A Palestinian human rights organization announced that the Israeli occupation army is holding the bodies of about 200 Palestinian martyrs it killed last year, noting that this data does not include the martyrs of the Gaza Strip.
The National Campaign to Recover the Bodies of Martyrs (non-governmental) said in a statement yesterday, Tuesday, that the occupation authorities are holding the bodies of 198 documented martyrs during the year 2024.
The statement stated that this number “constitutes a third of the martyrs detained in the number cemeteries and refrigerators for storing the dead, who are documented by the campaign, and who number 641 martyrs.”
He pointed out that these numbers do not include the detention of martyrs in the Gaza Strip, as there is no accurate information available about their number, while the re-occupation campaign documented the bodies of 325 martyrs from the Gaza Strip.
The “cemeteries of numbers” are simple cemeteries surrounded by stones without any evidence. A metal plate is installed over each grave bearing a number, not the name of the body’s owner. Each number has a special file maintained by the Israeli security authorities.
In September 2019, the Israeli Supreme Court issued a decision allowing the Israeli military commander to temporarily detain the bodies of Palestinians killed by the army and bury them for the purposes of using them as “future negotiating papers.”
With American support, Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza since October 7, 2023, leaving about 154,000 Palestinian martyrs and wounded, most of them children and women, and more than 11,000 missing, amid massive destruction and famine that killed dozens of children and the elderly, in one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world. .
In parallel, the occupation army expanded its operations and settlers escalated their attacks in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, resulting in 835 martyrs and about 6,700 wounded, according to official Palestinian data.
Israel continues its massacres, ignoring two arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court, last November 21, against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Galant, for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Palestinians in Gaza.
