After more than two years of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, a fragile ceasefire was announced on 9 October 2025.
Despite Israel’s continued violations, the brief pauses in bombardment have allowed Palestinians to start limited recovery efforts and hold long-overdue discussions on what must follow beyond emergency relief.
Within the first week of the ceasefire, 436 bodies were retrieved from under the rubble by Gaza’s Civil Defence teams, and 195 bodies were returned by Israel, of which only 57 were identified. With no functioning forensic equipment, many will be buried unnamed, leaving families trapped in uncertainty and suspended grief.
At first glance, this might appear to be a logistical issue, but the challenge has revealed a deeper moral and psychological crisis. The destruction of Gaza’s forensic capacity means the estimated 10,000 bodies still trapped beneath the rubble may never be identified or properly counted.
International teams have entered Gaza to search for the remains of Israeli captives, yet no comparable urgency exists to recover or identify Palestinian victims.
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This disparity exposes a moral imbalance – one that determines whose lives are treated as worthy of recognition and whose are forgotten. It also raises urgent questions about how this process, or its neglect, will shape memory and the possibility of healing for future generations.
The inability to name and bury loved ones denies both closure and dignity. It transforms mourning into an unending process, passing grief and silence from one generation to the next. The absence of identification capacity in Gaza will not only obstruct justice but also erode the foundations of personal and collective healing for Palestinians.
Naming the dead
In previous examples of post-genocide recovery, the process of identifying the dead has proved essential for healing and long-term reconciliation.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the remains of Bosniak victims continue to be unearthed and identified each year to be buried during the annual commemoration in Srebrenica in July.
Nearly 30 years after the Srebrenica genocide, hundreds of bodies remain missing. Their absence continues to impede healing for families and communities.
Recognition of the dead is inseparable from the rights of their families and the pursuit of justice
Early after the war, pictures of personal items and clothing found near mass burial sites were collected in a large book, which remains available to families across the country searching for answers.
Three decades later, the book remains a poignant testament to the enduring consequences of the lack of identification. Without properly naming the victims, mourning rituals are incomplete, and the sense of justice needed for healing is lost, leaving grief suspended between loss and silence.
Naming is also essential for accountability under international law. Although the Geneva Conventions require states to return the remains of the deceased, they often frame this obligation vaguely, requiring agreement between parties, as seen in the exchange of remains between Egypt and Israel in 1975-76.
Military manuals reinforce this duty and emphasise that it extends to personal effects, including documents, money, and items of sentimental value. These obligations reflect a broader principle: recognition of the dead is inseparable from the rights of their families and the pursuit of justice.
Forensic absence
For casualties to be named, the retrieved bodies must first be identified. But both steps, retrieval and identification, are impeded by Israel’s ongoing blockade of Gaza, including the ban on the entry of urgently needed equipment and personnel.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha), “It could take up to three years to retrieve the bodies using the primitive tools” available in Gaza.
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When large numbers of bodies lie unrecovered – or are buried, often in mass graves – the passage of time dramatically complicates identification. Decomposition accelerates biological breakdown, as research shows that prolonged burial reduces DNA yield and increases degradation.
Remains commingle, making it more difficult to distinguish between individuals. The integrity of skeletal elements also declines with time, further hindering forensic analysis.
These challenges underscore the urgency of timely identification.
International forensic teams – including Turkish, Qatari, and Egyptian – have entered Gaza to search for the remains of Israeli captives. Yet there is no comparable pressure to recover or identify thousands of Palestinian bodies.
The lack of concern or sense of urgency to recover and identify Palestinian victims reflects the same dehumanisation that allowed the world to watch as 67,000 of them were massacred, including at least 20,000 children.
Healing and reconstruction
Reconstruction in Gaza cannot be understood solely in material terms. It must go beyond the restoration of infrastructure or the delivery of aid to encompass the moral and psychological healing of a population that has endured unimaginable loss.
True reconstruction begins with rebuilding a people: acknowledging their suffering, validating their experiences, and creating a path forward that extends beyond mere survival.
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Real recovery requires confronting the moral, legal, and psychological void left by thousands of unidentified and unrecovered victims.
Naming, identifying, and returning bodies are, therefore, not only acts of justice but critical steps in restoring trust, memory, and communal resilience.
Without this process, grief is suspended, history becomes contested, and reconciliation and social healing remain incomplete.
Experiences from post-conflict societies illustrate the central role of identification in recovery.
In Bosnia, each annual burial at the Potocari Memorial Centre represents not just a private act of mourning, but a public affirmation of memory and truth. Even with the availability of proper equipment and experts, survivors face a long and difficult road towards healing trauma.
This becomes compounded in contexts where forensic recovery is delayed or denied and communities struggle to anchor their histories, allowing trauma to be transmitted across generations.
For Palestinians, this has been the case since the 1948 Nakba, when many who were expelled from their villages were prevented from ever returning to recover or identify loved ones killed during Israel’s terror campaign. The inability to name or bury the dead left wounds that could not heal, embedding grief within family histories and collective memory.
Nearly eight decades later, these same conditions are being reproduced in Gaza, where mass death, displacement, and a crushing blockade have once again deliberately threatened the possibility of closure, continuing a cycle of unresolved loss.
Alternative approaches
In the absence of fully equipped forensic teams, community-based approaches are emerging as stopgap measures.
Oral histories, local archives, and documentation efforts seek to preserve identities, honour lives and create a tangible record for families and future generations.
Dr Zaqout, director general of a hospital in Gaza, has said that photographs of bodies and personal items recovered will be displayed so that relatives can attempt to identify their loved ones.
Photographs of bodies and personal items recovered will be displayed so that relatives can attempt to identify their loved ones
Viral videos show families sitting in a tent, clicking through slideshows of bodies and belongings. For many, the experience is agonising, as decomposition has erased most identifiable traits, making confident identification nearly impossible.
Family members report looking for birthmarks or scars from earlier injuries they recall their loved ones having. Many others can only identify the clothes.
These methods, though imperfect, become essential when political and structural obstacles prevent formal forensic recovery. Yet they do little to address what Michael Pollanen, a forensic pathologist and professor at the University of Toronto, has described as an “international forensic emergency”.
Ultimately, reconstruction in Gaza must extend beyond homes, hospitals, and schools to rebuild the moral and psychological foundations needed to remember and honour the victims of the genocide. Only then can any semblance of healing take root – a process that may be slow and fraught, but remains indispensable.
A society that fails to recognise its dead risks carrying unresolved grief and injustice across generations, undermining the very foundations of reconciliation.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
