The Palestinian Center for the Missing and the Forcibly Disappeared announced that Israeli occupation authorities (IOA) are holding the bodies of about 1,500 Palestinians, including 665 identified bodies, in cemeteries of numbers and mortuaries.
In a statement on Thursday, the Center strongly condemned the IOA’s continued detention of the bodies of hundreds of Palestinians who were martyred during its attacks or inside its prisons, calling on the US President Donald Trump and the international community not to deal with this issue with double standards.
The Center indicated that these bodies include victims who died in the sixties and seventies of the last century, in addition to new martyrs, the latest of whom was from the Faraa camp in the West Bank, who was killed by the Israeli occupation army last Wednesday evening.
The Center called for immediate release of the detained bodies and enabling their families to bury them appropriately in accordance with religious and humanitarian customs and traditions.
It also reiterated its demand to reveal the fate of the forcibly disappeared people in Israeli occupation prisons, and to halt the Israeli policy of enforced disappearance, calling it a crime against humanity.
The human rights center also called for holding Israel accountable internationally for its crimes of detaining martyrs’ bodies and enforced disappearance, and to end the policy of double standards.
It stressed the need to bring in the necessary equipment and teams to retrieve the bodies of victims from under the rubble in the Gaza Strip, and to prevent Israel from imposing further collective punishment measures on civilians.
