Following the initial discovery in April 2024, Palestinian emergency workers continue to uncover mass graves throughout the Gaza Strip, particularly around hospitals that the Israeli military besieged and violently attacked. Approximately 140 mass graves have been identified since October 7, 2023, likely containing the remains of thousands of victims. Lacking forensic equipment, it is difficult for the emergency teams to investigate and document these graves. Furthermore, at the time of writing this paper, an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 people have been reported missing and feared to be buried under the rubble, as Israeli bombing transformed their apartment buildings and neighbourhoods into de facto mass graves. Simultaneously, Israeli bulldozers destroyed and desecrated many of Gaza's cemeteries as well as several makeshift graveyards that Palestinians created across the Strip since the beginning of the Israeli onslaught. Israeli military forces also used bulldozers to dismember and defile the corpses as they ruined and submerged distinct graves, transforming what had been individual graves into mass graves.

Israel has been denying any wrongdoing. In response to accusations of perpetrating such egregious violations in the two hospitals, Israel's military spokesperson has denied the army's involvement in the creation of mass graves, claiming that the graves had been ‘dug by Gazans a few months ago'. In another interview, the spokesperson reiterated Israel's denial and insisted that they had nothing to investigate, claiming: ‘We don't bury people in mass graves. Not something we do'. The spokesperson did not say a word about the hundreds of dead civilians found in these graves, focusing instead on the graves themselves while declaring that the military was not involved in their creation.

The following pages outline the significance of mass burial sites, what they reveal, and why it is important for Israel to conceal, destroy, and deny their existence. After addressing mass graves' legal meaning and ramifications, particularly as they pertain to the ongoing genocide, it is crucial to contextualise these practices within the broader framework of the Israeli settler-colonial regime and its longstanding history of abusing and desecrating the bodies of Palestinians. This examination highlights the elimination methods which Israel has deployed, aiming to strip Palestinians of their humanity. Even in death, Israel has been erasing their remains, identities, and memory, denying them a dignified burial, and depriving families of the grieving process and the opportunity to mourn their loved ones.

Throughout history, mass graves have served as enduring symbols of humanity's extensive record of massacres, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, and have consequently had significant evidentiary value. In recent decades, excavation of such burial sites exposed the ‘disappeared' in Latin America and the victims of genocide in Rwanda, Cambodia, and Former Yugoslavia. More recently, mass graves have been uncovered in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ukraine, and, as noted, in Gaza since October 7, 2023.

From a legal standpoint, the excavation of mass graves can help address two major concerns. First, excavation can help determine whether those buried in the grave are the remains of victims of forced disappearance or died as a result of illegal acts such as extra-judicial executions, torture, desecration of bodies, or even starvation. In this context, mass graves are considered crime scenes, serving as depositories of evidence of likely gross human rights violations. 

Second, the excavation of mass graves raise questions about whether the bodies were disposed of lawfully. International humanitarian law, as well as international customary law applicable during armed conflicts, require the respectful disposal of the dead in accordance with religious norms, and mandate the prevention of body despoiling and mutilation. Failure to abide by these obligations is considered a war crime under Article 8(xxi) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, specifically of committing ‘outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliation and degrading treatment,' which includes the degrading treatment of the dead. This provision is often breached by armed forces that use mass graves.

Mass graves, in other words, are often used to cover-up evidence of mass killings and are frequently an indication of crimes against humanity, especially at times of genocide. 

Despite their global ubiquity, mass graves are not defined under international law. They are commonly understood as burial structures containing multiple bodies, but there is no legal consensus on their specific characteristics. For example, in terms of numbers, some scholars specify a minimum of at least 6 buried bodies, others vaguely refer to ‘a number' or ‘large numbers' of individuals, and still others define mass graves as those containing more than one corpse. The Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, in her 2020 report on mass graves, did not establish a specific numerical threshold for defining a mass grave. However, she acknowledged the importance of numbers and proposed to distinguish between larger sites, containing hundreds or thousands of bodies, and smaller ones. She emphasised that this distinction between mass graves does not diminish the importance of smaller sites. Rather, the number of remains found in mass graves may be indicative of different legal, political, logistical, and memorialisation considerations. Large-scale mass graves, for example, might suggest greater intensity of state crimes or the systematic targeting of a specific group of people. 

The context behind the creation of mass graves also shapes how they should be defined and treated under international law. Mass graves may serve as burial sites or final resting places in situations where individual burials are not feasible, such as times of response to natural disasters or disease control. In such exceptional cases, where immediate practical measures are needed, bodies can be treated with respect, carefully placed in the grave and last rites can still be observed. However, in most cases, mass graves are associated with violent and criminal activities and are themselves sites of mass killings, the existence of which could be crucial in detecting possible war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

The 2020 Bournemouth Protocol on Mass Grave Protection, prepared by experts from various disciplines, including forensic investigators, judges, prosecutors and academics, aims to provide coherent guidelines to support practitioners protecting and investigating sites of mass graves. The Protocol defines mass graves as ‘a site or defined area containing a multitude (more than one) of buried, submerged or surface scattered human remains (including skeletonised, commingled and fragmented remains), where the circumstances surrounding the death and/or the body-disposal method warrant an investigation as to their lawfulness'. The Protocol, thus, limits the contextual remit of mass graves to those arising from gross human rights abuses and conflict, while excluding grave sites used to bury people who died as a result of natural disasters. The only exception to the latter is when the burial method was illegally performed or when a number of migrants and/or those who have been forcefully disappeared were killed and buried. 

According to the Bournemouth Protocol, the structure of the graves can vary from deliberate constructions, such as human-made graves, to natural sites such as oceans and rivers, to quasi forms of burial as when dead bodies are scattered on the surface of a terrain. The bodies found strewn on the streets of Bucha, Ukraine are cited by these experts as potential examples of mass graves because of the unlawful method of body disposal in addition to the unlawful killing. In a similar vein, the massive destruction of villages, as outlined by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), often conceals mass graves where people were buried under the rubble, often inside their own homes. Throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, entire villages were annihilated through burning, artillery fire and demolitions. 

Mass graves, as well as the bodies found within them, are repositories of evidence. Even though they are not clearly defined in international law, from a legal perspective the evidence they store can facilitate the survivors' right to know the truth and the perpetrators' accountability. Indeed, mass graves often serve as an archive of atrocities, and careful excavations of the graves can uncover evidence of crimes such as massacres and extra-judicial executions.

Mass graves have recently played a critical role in the trials of the ICTY, which found Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Indeed, forensic evidence from mass graves—notably the 2013 excavations of the Tomasica grave—was instrumental in demonstrating the involvement of armed forces in the forcible transfer and systematic elimination of the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) population from Srebrenica. Investigations by the ICTY had revealed that during ethnic cleansing campaigns, perpetrators also transported bodies from various locations and deliberately chose specific burial sites that might help conceal the crimes they had committed. These locations included ruins, rubbish dumps, caves, or cemeteries. 

Given their evidentiary value, any effort to conceal or destroy mass graves undermines criminal investigations and judicial processes, while simultaneously modifying history by covering up significant social wrongdoings.

Already during the first week of Israel's attacks, and before its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military committed numerous massacres, using large bombs to indiscriminately target homes, residentials towers and civilian infrastructure. Hospitals struggled to treat the overwhelming number of wounded who could reach them, and morgues were unable to accommodate the massive influx of corpses. Faced with the necessity of preventing the spread of disease, the Palestinian Civil Defence had no other choice but to bury the dead in mass graves throughout the overcrowded Strip. 

When the Israeli forces invaded the Gaza Strip on 27 October 2023, Israel not only continued and intensified its slaughter of Palestinians, but also seized the opportunity to extend its violent practices onto the dead. With tanks and bulldozers deployed in Gaza, the Israeli military targeted the dead in order to advance two main goals. First, while political and military officials openly expressed genocidal intent, Israel recognised the importance of covering-up the indiscriminate lethal attacks and massacres which it perpetrates. Mass graves and the disappearance of corpses thus became important tools in its arsenal of concealment and spurious justifications. Second, as an intrinsic part of its decades-long settler-colonial violence, Israel continued to dehumanise Palestinians by deliberately targeting the dignity of the dead and their families. As part of this process, Israel strives to erase Palestinian remains while prolonging the suffering of their families. This is evident in the prevention of proper burials, the use of mass graves, the active destruction of cemeteries, the desecration of bodies, and the abduction and withholding of Palestinians' corpses.

Not long after the ground invasion, Israel began defiling Palestinian bodies. Videos have emerged from Israel's first raid on Al-Shifa Hospital in November 2023, showing soldiers removing Palestinian bodies from a makeshift morgue and piling them into an Israeli army truck. Eyewitnesses reported at the time that Israeli soldiers took more than 100 Palestinian bodies. In December, news outlets documented Israeli soldiers digging up the dead bodies of Palestinians buried in makeshift graveyards in the courtyard of Kamal Adwan hospital. The military also levelled and destroyed existing cemeteries, including Al-Tuffah cemetery, east of Gaza City, and Al-Batsh makeshift cemetery, established on 22 October 2023. During those exercises, Israeli forces dug up thousands of graves and removed hundreds of recently buried corpses from the cemeteries, as they submerged individual graves into mounds of dirt. Families who had buried their loved ones in these cemeteries reported that the remains had ‘vanished'. The few investigative journalists on the ground have described the Israeli forces' destruction and levelling of cemeteries and burial sites and the removal of bodies as deliberate and systematic practices. Overtime, Israel has returned hundreds of bodies to Gaza in a defiled state, many decomposed and unidentifiable. The pretext for such crimes is Israel's search for the remains of hostages taken by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

Compounding these acts, Israeli soldiers have targeted and killed Palestinians fleeing their homes or attempting to return to them via designated ‘safe roads,' but have also prevented families from accessing certain areas to identify corpses and bury their loved ones. The victims' bodies were left to decompose unburied, strewn along the roads, completely at the mercy of the soldiers who decided their fate.[ Several documented incidents show Israeli soldiers in tanks and bulldozers defiling the bodies of Palestinians whom they themselves had killed, piling sand over them to ensure that their final burial places remain unknown. Two widely circulated videos, shared on social media platforms and picked up by mainstream news outlets, depicted soldiers using military bulldozers to scoop up the bodies of Palestinians. In one of the two videos, an Israeli soldier can be heard singing as several bodies are violently scooped by a bulldozer along with the sand they rest on: ‘The garbage truck is coming and taking the dirty trash… The garbage is being trashed'. The second video depicts a bulldozer scooping up two bodies and burying them in the sand on the beach, unmarked and unidentified. One can surmise that Israeli soldiers in bulldozers have also dragged and buried other bodies across Gaza.

As Israel's intensive and indiscriminate attacks on Gaza continued, entire neighbourhoods were turned into rubble. Of the estimated 7,000 to 10,000 missing Palestinians, many are suspected to be buried under the rubble. According to the Bournemouth Protocol, bodies entombed under the rubble are considered as being buried in mass graves. These bodies decompose under the remnants of what were once their homes, while Israel continues its extensive bombings and imposes restrictions on essential machinery entering Gaza. In the meantime, thousands of dead Palestinians' bodies decay without a dignified burial, while the evidence they might embody is lost forever.

Even though the thousands of tons of rubble and debris make up the largest mass grave in Gaza, in the ensuing months further reports have revealed the active involvement of Israel's military in burying Palestinians in mass graves containing hundreds of bodies, as seen at Nasser and Al-Shifa hospitals. Scenes from these sites showed Israeli soldiers using bulldozers to transfer corpses, suggesting that some bodies were moved to mass graves, possibly from earlier killings. Israeli troops appear to have unearthed bodies, relocated them, and removed identification details before re-burying them in new mass graves. Families who had buried their loved ones in makeshift graves on hospital grounds returned after the Israeli troops withdrew, only to find the graves dug up and the bodies missing. 

Israel's refusal to acknowledge the existence of mass graves mirrors historical precedents in which such graves were used to conceal crimes against humanity and genocides, as evidenced by the ongoing efforts to hide the mass graves that were used to cover up the crimes carried out against the indigenous Palestinian population. Similar forms of denial were recorded in Cambodia, Rwanda and following the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. In July of that year, Serbian forces executed over 8,000 Bosnian men and boys and deported thousands of women, children, and elderly. The military forces initially buried all the bodies in mass graves and later exhumed many bodies with bulldozers, dispersing the remains among various burial sites to further conceal the evidence of their crimes. During and after the massacres, the perpetrators continuously deceived the international community about the events in and around the enclave and systematically concealed, destroyed, and contaminated evidence of their crimes. 

It is thus not surprising that in response to the uncovering of the graves at Nasser and Al-Shifa hospitals in April 2024, the Israeli spokesperson focused on denying the military's role in creating the mass graves, while saying nothing about the hundreds of civilians buried in horrific conditions. To facilitate the cover-up, Israel also persists in imposing a siege on Gaza, blocking the entry of forensic experts and investigators, while preventing the effective collection and preservation of evidence. These actions stand in breach of international humanitarian law and the ruling of the International Court of Justice. 

The persistent denial and concealment of mass graves by states involved in atrocities reveal a systematic effort to obfuscate their own culpability and aim to enhance a culture of impunity. The evidence from Srebrenica and the recent discoveries at Nasser and Al-Shifa hospitals and throughout Gaza highlight the lengths to which perpetrators will go to conceal their crimes. Such denials help perpetuate the cycle of genocidal violence.

The Longstanding Abuses of the Palestinian Dead

Mass graves have historically been used as a tool to conceal crimes and to create and maintain the facade that there is nothing to investigate, nothing to be accountable for. Yet, in Israel's case, mass graves, the massacres that preceded them and the desecration of Palestinian dead bodies also function as settler-colonial tools of elimination, aiming to erase Palestinian presence and history.

Indeed, the ongoing genocide in Gaza is not the first time Israeli forces have employed mass graves and other methods to desecrate the dead while exercising ruthless violence against Palestinians. Israel's use of mass graves was inseparable from the mass expulsions and killings of the Nakba in 1948. Mass graves containing the remains of Palestinians and other Arabs massacred by Zionist militias and military forces since 1948 continue to be unearthed today in locations such as beach car parks, tourist resorts, demolished villages, and old cemeteries. It is therefore not an exaggeration to suggest that one might inadvertently walk over an unmarked mass grave anywhere in Israel. For example, following the Tantura massacre in May 1948 where the Zionist militias killed at least 200 unarmed Palestinian villagers, the perpetrators then proceeded to destroy the village and erase any trace of its existence. A letter dated 9 June 1948, written by an Israeli commander, made clear their intention to cover up the crimes: ‘Yesterday I checked the mass grave in Tantura cemetery. I found everything in order,' ensuring that no trace of the corpses was left. The attempts to conceal evidence of these crimes continued for decades. In 2000, an Israeli researcher who presented evidence of the mass murder was sued for defamation by veterans involved in the massacre and the destruction of the village, leading to the suppression and removal of his findings from his university's library. In 2023, however, new forensic investigations revealed four original cemeteries within the village's land that were demolished. The findings also identified two mass graves containing the remains of Tantura residents that the Zionist forces executed, and two other potential execution and burial sites. 

While the Nakba should be conceived as an integral part of the settler-colonial structure, rather than a one-off event, it is not surprising that over the past 76 years Zionist forces have continued to kill Palestinians and cover up their crimes by burying them in mass graves. Israeli security forces have burnt bodies, dug graves—at times coercing Palestinians into doing so, as in the case of the Kafr Qasim massacre in 1956 — and used bulldozers to desecrate the bodies. Even when massacres were executed by Israel's proxies, such as the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon, Israel provided the bulldozers that created the craters to which hundreds of bodies were cast. The Israeli military attempted to employ similar tactics during the attacks on the Jenin refugee camp in 2002, when they killed Palestinians and subsequently denied their families the ability to bury their loved ones, planning instead to bury tens of bodies in mass graves. 

As with the ongoing genocidal military campaign in Gaza, the historical use of mass graves is not isolated; the Palestinian dead are targeted in various ways. This includes the destruction of cemeteries, as seen in Tantura village in 1948, and more recent attempts against the Al-Qassam Cemetery in Haifa and the al-Yousufiya cemetery in Jerusalem in 2021. The targeting of Palestinian bodies is further demonstrated by Israel's creation of the ‘cemeteries of enemy dead' in the late 1960s within closed and secret military zones. There, Israel captured and buried Palestinians (and other Arabs) it has killed, deliberately refusing to return their bodies to their families. These sites, known to Palestinians as the ‘cemeteries of numbers,' do not contain tombstones, but rather iron bars with numbers which leave the bodies unidentified. It was later revealed that the bodies were buried in a single line, separated only by narrow trenches that eventually collapsed, effectively submerging the individual graves and transforming them into a mass grave. These practices indicate that the bodies were buried in a manner which was extremely negligent and demeaning, intended to permanently sever any connection between the dead and their grieving families.

The confinement of Palestinian bodies at Israel's National Center of Forensic Medicine (Abu Kabir) represents yet another persisting practice. Bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces are held in freezers and only returned to their families under strict conditions, usually concerning funeral arrangements. Often frozen and almost unrecognisable, Palestinians' bodies are returned without giving their families any opportunity to examine them before burial or to carry out the traditional burial rituals. Such practices strip families from their ability to properly mourn their loved ones and exacerbate the dehumanising treatment inflicted upon them.

This systemic disregard for Palestinian dignity is further institutionalised through policies that explicitly use Palestinian bodies as instruments of leverage. Effective 1 January 2017, the Israeli government adopted the ‘uniform policy' for handling corpses of Palestinians, explicitly using them as ‘bargaining chips.' This policy, which only formalised a long-standing unwritten practice, received approval from the Israeli Supreme Court, thereby authorising the military to to treat Palestinian corpses as ‘hostages.' It also allows the military to engage in highly degrading practices such as collecting dead bodies of Palestinians in bulldozers, dragging them as they are defiled and desecrated, and exhuming them from their graves; actions that are widely evident in Gaza today.

Mass graves have historically been sites of human cruelty and suffering. They have been an inseparable part of the violence that the Israeli military has carried out against Palestinians since 1948. Israel has deliberately and systematically used mass graves as a tool to conceal and destroy evidence that could expose the kinds and scale of its crimes. Such graves literally cover-up the bodies and legally cover-up the crimes, enabling Israel to deny killings, manipulate death tolls, conceal causes of deaths, and obliterate the identities of those whom it killed. These strategies are being fully utilised in Israel's ongoing genocidal onslaught on Gaza.

The crucial point is that these practices are integral to Israel's settler-colonial regime. Since the state's creation, Israel has sought to displace and replace the indigenous Palestinian population. Thus, stripping Palestinian dead bodies from their dignity and denying them and their families their humanity feed into the processes of racialisation and dehumanisation as to intensify elimination. This involves desecrating Palestinian bodies, holding them hostage, depriving them of the right to a proper burial, and denying families the opportunity to mourn.

All over historic Palestine, the bodies of Palestinians remain unprotected, subjected to ongoing colonial violence. In Gaza, Israel's use of mass graves, the desecration of dead bodies, the destruction of burial sites, and the prevented access of forensic investigation teams are all calculated decisions to cover-up evidence which could be used to hold the perpetrators accountable, exposing Israel's long history of erasure and dehumanisation that is inherent in its settle-colonial tactics.