Detaining the Bodies of Palestinian Martyrs: A Long History of Colonial Violence
By: Hussein Shuja'iya
2024
Since its early beginnings, Zionist colonialism has employed clear policies aimed at controlling all aspects of life, both tangible and intangible. This colonialism inherited its policies from the British Mandate, which paved the way and contributed to the establishment of the occupation state. These policies include prisons, the colonial separation wall, checkpoints, watchtowers, annexation policies, land confiscation, killing, and human rights violations. It can be said that these colonial policies constitute practices with visible and direct impacts on Palestinian society. However, Zionist colonialism has long resorted to other practices and methods whose effects are hidden and not immediately apparent, among which is the policy of detaining the bodies of martyrs.
This paper discusses the long history of detaining the bodies of martyrs, the underlying motives behind this policy, and the escalation of this policy since the beginning of the war of extermination on Gaza. It relies on official statistics regarding the policy of detaining martyrs' bodies, analysis of writings on the issue, testimonies from the families of detained martyrs, and analysis of information and statistics available to the national campaign regarding the detention of martyrs' bodies.
Detaining the Bodies of Palestinian Martyrs: A Long History of Violence
The policy of detaining the bodies of martyrs can be defined as the deprivation of Palestinian families from their right to bid farewell to their martyred loved ones and to bury them in the place they choose according to their rituals and beliefs. The Israeli occupation steals the bodies of martyrs after their martyrdom and holds them for varying periods in numbered cemeteries, in morgue refrigerators, and recently in the "Sde Teiman" camp.[1]
The occupation goes beyond stealing and holding the bodies by denying families the right to confirm the martyrdom of their loved ones, preventing them from seeing and inspecting the bodies. This policy is justified as a means of leverage and bargaining against the Palestinian resistance in any upcoming prisoner exchange deal, but it is merely an attempt to control the Palestinian, both alive and dead, and a means to deter Palestinians from resisting the occupation.[2] The Palestinian body may thus become entangled "in the political field directly and daily, with colonial control measures and Israeli practices etched onto its skin, whether alive or dead," as Suhad Daher-Nashif states.[3]
While this policy appears to be a way of punishing the families of martyrs, it is a complex colonial policy aimed at destroying the social systems and life values tied to the community and its relationship with the bodies of the dead and martyrs. It adds to other colonial policies, such as punitive house demolitions and administrative detention. The long history of this and other colonial policies in Palestine traces back to British colonialism, including the execution of martyrs Mohammed Jamjoum and Atta al-Zeer from Hebron, and Fuad Hijazi from Safed, on June 17, 1930, in Acre Prison. They were subsequently buried in Acre, far from their cities and family cemeteries, marking one of the first instances of deprivation and abuse of martyrs and their families by the British Mandate.[4]
During the subsequent years, the British Mandate developed this policy and included it in the 1945 Defense (Emergency) Regulations, where, for instance, Article 133(3) states: "The district commander is entitled to order the burial of any person executed in the central prison in Acre or the central prison in Jerusalem in the cemetery of the community to which the person belonged, according to the directives provided."[5] These laws evolved and were transferred from the British Mandate to Israeli occupation, which incorporated them into governing laws in Palestine, and the occupation established its full legal framework to continue the detention of martyrs' bodies.
The issue of detaining the bodies of martyrs saw a significant escalation during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, when the Israeli army began detaining the bodies of Palestinian martyrs in "numbered cemeteries," which are military cemeteries in the Jordan Valley, Negev, and Golan regions. These bodies are buried in graves marked only with metal plates that bear numbers instead of names. With the onset of the Jerusalem uprising in October 2015, the occupation took several measures to punish and deter Palestinians, including activating the policy of detaining bodies for reasons of "security and public order." During this period, the occupation detained hundreds of bodies in morgues, especially in the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine.[6]
The Right to Burial: Zionist Death Policies
Palestinians recognize that Zionist occupation aims, through its punitive policies, to control the Palestinian body, both alive and dead, and to regulate everything related to their existence, including destroying their inherited values and life systems, which constitute the structure, nature, and identity of society. The issue of detaining martyrs' bodies goes beyond depriving families of the right to bury their loved ones; it reaches the extent of determining when, where, and how condolences are held, the social implications regarding the form of the funeral, burial methods, and mourning houses. This necessarily affects the family’s structure, its relationship with loss, and its social handling of death in general, especially the sacred death of martyrs, thus disrupting the structure of Palestinian society.
Human decency dictates that the dead should have the right to be buried in their homeland’s soil, a duty even more significant in the case of martyrs. Therefore, Palestinians have struggled and continue to struggle for this right. The demand to retrieve the bodies and honor the martyrs is based on several laws and religious doctrines that outline the treatment of the dead and the return of remains. International humanitarian law establishes five customary rules for the treatment of war dead, their remains, and graves, which include: Rule 112 concerning searching for and gathering the dead, Rule 113 on protecting the dead from looting and mutilation, Rule 114 on returning the remains and personal belongings of the dead, Rule 115 on the disposal of the dead, and Rule 116 on identifying the dead.[7]
Additionally, the First Geneva Convention of 1949, in Article 17, emphasizes the importance of dignified and respectful burial. It states that parties to a conflict "must ensure the honorable burial of the dead, if possible, according to the rites of the religion to which they belong, respect their graves, and, if possible, group them according to nationality, then maintain and mark them so that they can always be located."[8] Article 120 of the Third Geneva Convention,[9] Article 130 of the Fourth Geneva Convention,[10] and Article 34 of the Additional Protocol also stipulate the obligation to facilitate the return of the bodies and remains of the deceased.[11]
Escalation of Body Detention in the West Bank
The policy of detaining martyrs' bodies has significantly escalated since the beginning of the Zionist war on the Gaza Strip in October 2023. The National Campaign to Retrieve the Bodies of Martyrs has so far documented the detention of 569 martyrs' bodies. This includes 256 bodies detained in numbered cemeteries—a figure the campaign has documented since 1967—as well as 313 bodies detained since the resumption of the policy in 2015. Among them are 55 children under the age of 18, 32 martyrs from the prisoner movement who died in occupation prisons, and nine female martyrs.[12]
The table below is based on the list of detained martyrs' bodies documented by the National Campaign to Retrieve the Bodies of Martyrs as of the date of writing this paper. I conducted a comparison on the increase in the number of detained martyrs from 2016 to the present.
It should also be noted that the occupation holds the bodies of six martyrs who were Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, who were martyred during operations in northern occupied Palestine.[13] Furthermore, the detention policy escalated in the areas occupied in 1948, where the occupation holds the bodies of seven martyrs, the most recent being the martyr and prisoner Walid Daqqa, based on a decision by the "Occupation War Council" to withhold the bodies for use in future exchange deals.[14] This represents a policy shift, as the occupation did not previously withhold the bodies of martyrs from the 1948 areas; they were typically returned within days under certain burial conditions and financial guarantees due to their possession of Israeli citizenship. Consequently, they were not subjected to the withholding conditions as a bargaining chip in exchange deals, as is the case with other martyrs.
It is also noted that 53% of the martyrs currently documented since the policy’s resumption in 2015 are those who have died since the beginning of the current war. The occupation has withheld the bodies of 167 martyrs[15] out of 313 since 2016. The table above shows the detention of 81 martyrs' bodies in 2023; looking at the detention dates, 54% (44 martyrs) were withheld since October 7, 2023, until the end of the year. Since the start of the war, the occupation has sought to withhold as many bodies as possible to use them in anticipated negotiations with the resistance, especially since the resistance holds bodies of captured soldiers and settlers. We also observe a significant decline in the release of martyrs' bodies, with occupation authorities releasing only 11 bodies since October 7 to the present.[16]
Detention of Gaza Martyrs' Bodies
In light of the ongoing war of extermination on the Gaza Strip, there is no accurate information regarding the bodies of martyrs who were killed on October 7 or whose bodies were taken from Gaza during the war. According to Palestinian documentation, on November 18, 2023, during an invasion of the Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, the occupation army stole the bodies of 145 martyrs, some of whom were from a newly established cemetery within the complex.[17] On January 6, 2024, during a raid in the Al-Daraj neighborhood in Gaza, occupation forces exhumed a cemetery in the neighborhood and took the bodies of 150 martyrs, according to the Gaza Government Media Office. This was repeated during the occupation army's invasion of Khan Younis, where it destroyed the Austrian neighborhood cemetery on January 17, 2024, and took an unknown number of bodies. The occupation army claimed that the purpose of taking the bodies was to conduct DNA tests to ensure that none of the captives were among them.
In July 2024, some information surfaced about the bodies of martyrs detained from the Gaza Strip. The Israeli newspaper "Haaretz" revealed that the Israeli occupation holds about 1,500 unidentified Palestinian bodies in refrigerated containers at the military base known as "Sde Teiman." The bodies are classified by numbers rather than names. The newspaper reported that the bodies had reached a certain level of decomposition, with some missing limbs and others lacking distinguishable features. It is likely that these bodies belong to martyrs who fell in the early days of the war on Gaza.[18]
Occupation authorities had previously handed over the bodies of 423 unidentified martyrs in multiple batches, which were buried in mass graves in Khan Younis and Rafah in southern Gaza. This creates a state of loss for hundreds of families in Gaza who await news about the fate of their loved ones.[19] The main challenge for Palestinians in this file is that the health sector in Palestine lacks DNA testing capabilities.[20] Consequently, these mass graves will eventually need to be opened, with samples taken from the martyrs and compared to families of the missing to identify them.
Thus, with the continuation of the brutal and morally unrestrained war, there are thousands of missing persons and those forcibly disappeared. This adds to the challenges of determining their fate as the war continues, particularly with the ongoing violence and prevention of access to the bodies, leading to the decomposition of remains and the loss of features that identify the martyrs.
Bodies as Bargaining Chips
The occupation first used the bodies of martyrs as bargaining tools with Palestinians in 1994, through a petition on this practice submitted to the Supreme Court on behalf of the family of martyr Hassan Abbas, a member of the Al-Qassam Brigades whose body was held by the occupation. At the time, the Attorney General's office required finding the body of Ilan Saadon, an Israeli soldier killed in 1989, in exchange for the release of Abbas's body. The court's ruling at the time deemed that locating the soldier's body before releasing Abbas's was a reasonably justified condition.
The use of Palestinian bodies as bargaining tools has been a subject of legal debate since the 1990s. The Israeli Supreme Court legitimized this policy, considering its use lawful under the "reasonableness" and "appropriateness" standards. Israel based this policy on the Defense (Emergency) Regulations from the British Mandate era, interpreting it in various ways over the years, leading to differing court rulings on the legality of this practice.[21]
The latest decision by occupation authorities in this matter came in September 2019, when the "Israeli Supreme Court" allowed the detention of bodies and their use in potential exchange negotiations based on Article 133 of the British Emergency Law. This decision applies to bodies buried in numbered cemeteries and allows for the transfer of bodies held in refrigerators to numbered cemeteries after completing all registration and documentation procedures.[22]
Retrieval of Martyrs' Bodies
Families of martyrs have individually struggled to retrieve the bodies of their loved ones since the occupation began the policy of detaining martyrs' bodies, with some families succeeding, such as the family of martyr Ali Taha.[23] In 2018, the National Campaign to Recover Martyrs' Bodies and Reveal the Fate of the Missing was launched by the Jerusalem Center for Legal Aid and Human Rights. This campaign has achieved some milestones, including establishing a reference for detained bodies, particularly in light of the lack of official documents about this detention policy and the absence of legal and rights documentation mechanisms at the time. This central issue was raised amid its absence from the agendas of official Palestinian human rights and political work, and no demands were made regarding the bodies in negotiations following the Oslo Accords, despite the significant attention given to the prisoners' issue in political discourse.
The campaign began legal work to retrieve the body of martyr Mashhour Al-Arouri from Aroura village near Ramallah following its documentation efforts. The Al-Arouri family managed to recover his remains from the numbered graves in 2010 on August 10. Likewise, the family of Hafez Abu Zant from Nablus retrieved their son’s remains on October 9, 2011, after legal efforts.[24]
In July 2012, the occupation authorities handed over the remains of 91 martyrs to the Palestinian Authority as a goodwill gesture to resume negotiations.[25] During 2013-2014, the bodies of 27 martyrs were handed over as part of a decision by the Israeli Supreme Court to release 36 bodies, but the occupation withdrew from the release under the pretext of "security reasons."
Since the return of the detention policy in 2015, the occupation authorities have handed over the bodies of 262 martyrs, held in its refrigerators for periods ranging from days to years. Some of these released martyrs' families faced harsh conditions, such as nighttime burials, high financial deposits, or limiting the number of mourners. These conditions were mainly imposed on families of martyrs from occupied Jerusalem and areas within 1948 borders.[26]
The issue of exchanging bodies was proposed as a central file during the current exchange deal negotiations, with the third phase of the framework for the deal including the exchange of bodies after identification. This is the first time that the issue of martyrs' bodies has been raised in an exchange deal with Palestinians, as the resistance holds the bodies of Israeli prisoners. The bodies of 517 martyrs were previously released in exchange deals between the Israeli occupation and Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Syrian army, the latest being the 2008 exchange deal, in which more than 200 bodies of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Arab martyrs held in numbered graves were released.[27]
Conclusion
On Friday, July 23, 2017, young Mohammed Hassan Abu Ghanem was martyred at the entrance to his village, Al-Tur, east of occupied Jerusalem, during a popular uprising against the installation of gates at mosque entrances. The notable scene after Abu Ghanem's martyrdom was what happened with his body after the announcement of his death at Al-Makassed Hospital in Jerusalem. "The friends of the martyr Mohammed smuggled his body from the hospital before the occupation forces could seize it, and they hastily buried him to ensure he would be laid to rest."[28]
This story and others reflect the Palestinians' awareness of the importance of liberating martyrs and their refusal to bargain over them, refusing to forget this issue despite the passage of decades. It also demonstrates the certainty among martyrs' families about the value of burial rituals, mourning, and liberating the martyrs' bodies, challenging colonial policies. This requires a collective struggle to recover the bodies as part of our memory of resistance, and to protect the cultural and social structure in a continuous confrontation with the occupation’s attempts to strip us of our humanity.
The policy of detaining Palestinian martyrs' bodies persists in light of the current war of extermination, as part of ongoing colonial violence, which has intensified at all levels to impose control not only over Palestinian land and people but also over Palestinian bodies after death. This extensive detention of bodies, spanning Gaza, the West Bank, the 1948 territories, and even Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, is part of a broader strategy aimed at pressuring Palestinians by seizing bodies, abusing them, and using them as bargaining chips in any future exchange deal.
[1] "Occupation Army Detains Martyrs' Bodies in Sde Teiman Camp," "Ultra Sawt."
[2] Badoor Hasan, "The Warmth of Our Children."
[3] Suhad Daher-Nashif, "Administrative Detention of Palestinian Bodies: Suspending and Freezing Death," "Palestinian Studies Journal," Summer 2016.
[4] Awad Rajoub, "92 Years Since 'Red Tuesday'... What Did the Three Palestinian Martyrs Do Before Their Execution?" "Al Jazeera Net," 6/17/2022.
[5] Defense (Emergency) Regulations of 1945, Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestinian Issue website.
[6] Interview with attorney Mohammad Abu Sunaina, who works on cases related to martyrs' body detention.
[7] Rules of International Humanitarian Law, International Committee of the Red Cross website.
[8] Geneva Convention of 1949, International Committee of the Red Cross website.
[9] Third Geneva Convention, University of Minnesota website.
[10] Fourth Geneva Convention, University of Minnesota website.
[11] Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, United Nations website.
[12] Factsheet / Numbered Graves website, 8/2024.
[13] Same source.
[14] "To Keep Them as Bargaining Chips: The Israeli 'Cabinet' Decides Not to Release the Bodies of 7 Martyrs from 1948, Including the Fighter Walid Daqqa," WAFA Agency website, 9/2/2024.
[15] Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, United Nations website.
[16] "Martyrs Released in 2024," National Campaign to Recover Martyrs' Bodies website.
[17] "Theft of Gaza Martyrs' Bodies by the Occupation Sparks Outrage on Social Media," "Al Jazeera," 5/22/2024.
[18] "Indexed by Numbers... The Occupation Detains the Bodies of 1,500 Palestinians in 'Sde Teiman'," "Al Araby TV" website, 7/16/2024.
[19] Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, United Nations website.
[20] "What If There Were DNA Testing in Palestine?" "Ma'an News Agency" website, 11/2/2013.
[21] Badoor Hasan, previously mentioned source.
[22] Israeli Supreme Court Decision No. 10190/17.
[23] Hanadi Adameh, "The Search Journey for Ali's Body," "Metras" website, 5/9/2018.
[24] "Legal Efforts That Accompanied the Retrieval of the Body of Martyr Hafez Abu Zant," Wadi Hilweh Information Center, 10/11/2011.
[25] "Funeral Procession of 91 Martyrs in Palestine," "Al Jazeera Net," 6/1/2012.
[26] “Adalah demands Israel immediately return bodies of Al Aqsa shooting suspects,” Adalah, 7/20/2017.
[27] "Liberation of Arab and Palestinian Martyrs' Bodies in Exchange Deals," National Campaign to Recover Detained Martyrs' Bodies and Reveal the Fate of the Missing.
[28] "Abu Ghanem... Chased by Occupation Soldiers at the Hospital Until He Was Martyred," "Al Jazeera Net," 8/24/2017.
About the Author
Hussain Shujaia: Researcher and Campaign Coordinator at the Jerusalem Center for Legal Aid and Human Rights.