Transparency & Accountability
Palestinian families march for the 1,700 bodies Israel still holds
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Families whose dead Israel has never returned marched in seven West Bank cities on Thursday, on the national day set aside for Palestinian and Arab bodies held by Israel.
The demonstrations were held in al-Bireh, Nablus, Hebron, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Tubas and Bethlehem, the Xinhua news agency reported. Relatives carried flags and banners alongside representatives of the Palestinian factions.
They were organised by the National Campaign to Retrieve the Bodies of Martyrs and Disclose the Fate of the Missing, the body that has kept the count for years because no state institution does.
Two numbers, and the distance between them#
Hussein Shuja'iya, the campaign's coordinator, said Israeli authorities are currently holding more than 1,700 Palestinian bodies in morgues, military camps and burial grounds.
Of those, the campaign says it has documented 800 case by case: 256 in the burial grounds Palestinians call the cemeteries of numbers, where graves carry a figure instead of a name, and 544 withheld since Israel reinstated the practice in 2015.
The gap between 1,700 and 800 is itself the story the campaign is telling. The larger figure is what it believes is held; the smaller is what it has been able to verify with a family, a date and a place — and verification is difficult precisely because the state holding the bodies publishes no list.
In a tally issued in January and carried by the official Palestinian news agency WAFA, the campaign put the documented total at 776, among them 96 members of the prisoners' movement, 77 children under eighteen and ten women.
A grave with a number on it is not a grave. It is a file the family is not allowed to close.
The families' demand, as the campaign has framed it since 2015
Why the count keeps moving#
The practice reaches back to 1967 for the oldest of the numbered graves, and the campaign's documentation work is the only continuous record of who lies in them. Some bodies are returned after years, sometimes singly and sometimes in groups, which is why the figure moves in both directions.
What has not moved is the position of the families: a body held is a mourning that cannot be performed, a burial that cannot be held and, in Islamic and Christian practice alike, a rite owed to the dead and withheld from the living.
The pattern was visible again in Jenin on Friday, hours after the marches ended. The Palestine Red Crescent Society said its crews reached the site of an Israeli airstrike, were held by soldiers and were then ordered to leave without carrying away the dead.
That is how a case begins. Between the moment a body is taken at the scene and the moment it appears in a campaign spreadsheet, a family spends months asking an army, a court and a morgue where their son is.
The campaign's demand this week was the one it has made every August: publish the list, disclose the fate of the missing, and return the dead to the people entitled to bury them.
