The body is also involved in the political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
The Israeli regime has been applying physical and psychological dominance over Palestinians bodies, living and dead, for decades.
What does it mean for Palestinians who have been killed?
Since the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, the Israeli regime has been holding hundreds of bodies of Palestinians it has executed: some are in freezers, and others are probably buried in mass graves commonly known by Palestinians as “cemeteries of numbers”.
This causes endless pain for the families who are not able to grieve or find any closure.
It is a way to reinstate that “sovereignty over the body ultimately derives from sovereignty over the land” (Suhad Daher-Nashif, lecturer and researcher of social-medical Anthropology).
The Israeli apartheid regime has transformed Palestinian bodies into political bargaining chips during negotiations, such as prisoners’ exchange. In 2018, the Israeli Parliament passed an amendment to the so-called Counterterrorism Law, granting themselves the right to withhold the bodies until the families accept the dictated conditions on the martyrs’ funeral arrangements.
For Palestinians, martyrs’ funerals are not only a mourning ritual, but also become a political act of defiance and collective solidarity.
This is why Israeli occupation forces often attack funerals and restrict public gatherings.
The Israeli regime continues to hold 115 Palestinian bodies since 2015, while at least 265 bodies are buried in the “cemeteries of numbers”.
In 2003 Israeli occupation forces confirmed the existence of at least two of these cemeteries: Amiad Cemetery close to Safed and Jisr Adam Cemetery in the Jordan Valley.
These cemeteries are closed military zones, not accessible to the public. The plates have numbers known by the Israeli military only: no name, no dates, no origins.
Israel’s conditions to release detained bodies has often prevented Palestinians from doing autopsies on the bodies.
This way, they control the narrative around the circumstances of Palestinian death and execution.In 2022, families of martyrs launched a national popular protest campaign called “we want our children” to raise awareness and put pressure on the Israelis to release their relatives’ bodies, after many families had exhausted all recourse to no avail, including through the Israeli supreme court.
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