Calculated chaos: Inside Israel’s transfer of Palestinian bodies to Gaza
Palestinians bury bodies in a mass grave in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, 22 November 2023
Frances Brogan reports in +972 on 15 July 2026:
At 6 a.m. one frigid December morning in 2023, a truck driver in Gaza opened the lid of a 12-meter-long metal shipping container. Inside, neatly stacked and wrapped in bright blue zip-tied nylon, he found the remains of 80 Palestinian men, women, and children.
Officials from the Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA) for Gaza — the local branch of COGAT, the Israeli military unit that manages the civil affairs of Palestinians under Israel’s occupation — had called UN workers earlier that morning, asking them to arrange for the container’s retrieval from a terminal near the Karem Abu Salem/Kerem Shalom crossing between the Gaza Strip, Israel, and Egypt. Ariel, a UN worker stationed nearby (who requested a pseudonym and gender-neutral pronouns for fear of reprisals by Israel), had dispatched the driver to the terminal, who then transported the container to the Gaza side of the crossing.
Even though the CLA refused to provide details, Ariel knew what was inside. The officials’ reticence had triggered their worst suspicions, and there were holes in the container’s metal walls that emanated the putrid smell of decomposing bodies from 30 meters away. But Ariel did not want to see for themself; they had urgent aid deliveries to supervise, and handling corpses was not part of their mandate. It was a relief when personnel from Gaza’s Health Ministry came to collect the container the following morning.
Because the bodies arrived unidentified and in various states of decomposition — and since Israel has continually blocked the entry into Gaza of forensic identification tools, including DNA testing kits — contacting the families of the deceased was impossible.
Ariel and their colleagues had previously assisted the return of dozens of Palestinian detainees to Gaza from Israeli prisons and military detention camps via Karem Abu Salem. They were not sure if the bodies in this container belonged to detainees who died in Israeli custody, or individuals who were killed in Gaza and then taken into Israel. The names of the dead, and how they died, remain unknown.
This was no one-off. Interviews with more than 15 humanitarian workers, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of being targeted by Israel, reveal a system in which Israel’s return of both dead and living Gazans during the first months of the genocide was carried out with little warning, no transparency, and virtually no reliable record keeping.
The testimonies of Ariel and other aid workers shed new light on why the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have struggled to account for thousands of Palestinians detained by Israel since the start of the genocide in October 2023, including those who may have died in custody. The accounts also raise questions about the accuracy of published data, suggesting that the fates of the disappeared who are unaccounted for — both dead and alive — may never be known.
Hundreds of unidentified bodies
After Israel launched its ground invasion of Gaza in late October 2023, the military arrested thousands of Palestinians and transferred them to military detention facilities inside Israel, including the notorious Sde Teiman base. There, detainees were held without charge and utterly isolated from the outside world, deprived of food, tortured, and subjected to sexual violence.
Military detention facilities are intended to serve as temporary holding sites before detainees are moved to Israel’s prison system and formally registered. But many Palestinians last seen by witnesses in military custody never appeared in official prison or military records, according to the Israeli human rights organization HaMoked, stymying any efforts to trace their whereabouts.
“While there is underreporting with every human rights violation that you could think of, it’s even more [for] enforced disappearances,” said Grażyna Baranowska, a member of the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances. According to the UN, no war or emergency situation can justify forcibly disappearing individuals; when practiced widely or systematically, it can amount to a crime against humanity.