the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Feb 16, 2026
This article is translated from the February 13 issue, #3002 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
To justify continuing the war in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounces Hamas’ use of the bodies of deceased Israelis as bargaining chips. But Israel’s government also engages in this sordid practice and on a much larger scale.
Netanyahu’s own government admits that the war in Gaza has claimed more than 70,000 lives. But no one knows how many Palestinians have disappeared under the rubble, or how many bodies the Israeli army holds. Nearly 360 mostly unrecognizable Palestinian corpses were handed over as part of the trades arranged with Hamas in exchange for the release of hostages. Another 54 bodies were transferred to Gaza on February 4, along with 60 crates holding the remains of an undetermined number of Palestinians.
This practice of refusing to return the remains of Palestinians to their families was inherited from the British colonial authorities and has persisted since the creation of the State of Israel. In 1948, Zionist militias carried out massacres in Arab villages to terrorize the inhabitants and force them to flee. Bodies were buried in mass graves which are still being discovered today during construction of beachfront parking lots and tourist resorts. After 1948, Israeli authorities created “enemy dead cemeteries” in closed military zones for burials of Palestinians killed by the army. Their graves are marked only by numbers.
In 2017, the government institutionalized these practices by officially decreeing that the bodies of Palestinians killed “during terrorist operations” or who died in prison would be preserved for use as bargaining chips. Bodies were kept in freezers at Israel’s National Forensic Medicine Center. Some were returned to their families under strict conditions, with no option to examine them before burial. According to a Palestinian NGO, Israel still holds 672 bodies of Palestinians from the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
This policy reflects the violence employed by Israeli leaders for the past 80 years to deprive Palestinians of their land, property, and rights. Since its inception, Israel has waged a perpetual war against the Palestinians with the more or less overt complicity of major powers, first of all the U.S. Even today, after nearly three years of mass slaughter in Gaza, most Western governments remain silent in condemning Israeli state terrorism and the way it holds Palestinians hostage, dead or alive.