Frances Brogan
+972 Magazine / July 15, 2026
Humanitarian workers describe a haphazard and deliberately opaque system for returning dead and living Gazans during the first months of the genocide — one that helps explain why thousands are still missing.
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.
By May 2024, UN workers at Karem Abu Salem had facilitated the return of over 1,500 living Palestinian detainees to Gaza and received a total of 227 unidentified corpses from three separate deliveries: 80 in December 2023, 100 in January 2024, and 47 in March 2024. According to Zaher al-Wahidi, a health official in Gaza, the Health Ministry transferred the bodies they received to Mohammed Yousef al-Najar Hospital in nearby Rafah. The dead were ultimately buried in a mass grave in the city, without any markers to commemorate the loss.
The UN’s systematic tracking ended in March 2024, when Israel’s incursion into Rafah drastically curtailed humanitarian access to the crossing (Israel returned a further 100 bodies in August 2024 and 88 in September, which the Health Ministry transported to Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis before they were buried in the Austrian Cemetery). Even before then, however, the tracking effort was fragmented and ad hoc, because it fell to aid workers whose formal responsibilities did not include receiving detainees or the dead, and Israel’s notice of impending returns was minimal or non-existent.
The total figure of 415 bodies deposited at Karem Abu Salem between December 2023 and September 2024 is consistent with estimates from aid workers involved with the transfers. Many of the bodies were decomposed, missing limbs, or mutilated; some were decapitated or had been skinned. The deliveries also contained dismembered body parts, making it impossible to determine the exact number returned. None of the bodies have since been identified.
“The Israeli occupation refused to provide us with any information indicating their identities or circumstances,” Zaher Al-Wahidi lamented. Failing to identify the dead, treat human remains with dignity, and protect people in custody are all violations of international humanitarian law.
Israel’s clandestine transfer of dead Palestinians in September 2024 is the last known delivery of its kind. The army returned hundreds more Palestinian bodies as part of the ceasefire deal last October, and has continued to release small groups of living detainees through Karem Abu Salem and Kissufim, primarily in coordination with the ICRC.
Today, after nearly three years of genocide, around 8,000 Gazans are still missing, according to the Palestinian Center for Missing and Forcibly Disappeared Persons. But those numbers primarily rely on reports from relatives. The real figure is almost certainly higher because entire families have been killed in Gaza, leaving no one to report their disappearance.
Out of the 5,400 tracing requests submitted by families in Gaza through HaMoked, more than 1,800 residents remain unaccounted for after the Israeli military provided no indication that they had been arrested or detained.
Tal Steiner, Hamoked’s executive director, believes most of those still missing are likely dead, though it remains unclear whether they were killed in impromptu detention sites inside Gaza, in Israeli military custody, in combat zones, as a result of being used by the Israeli army as human shields, or whether they are still entombed in rubble from Israeli airstrikes. Some of them may have been among the unidentified bodies later returned to Gaza.
The uncertainty is exacerbated by Israel’s long and documented history of withholding Palestinian bodies. As of January 2026, the state was holding the remains of at least 776 Palestinians dating back to 1967, including 88 people who died in the custody of the Israel Prison Service (IPS) or the military after October 7.
‘Everything is spontaneous — and that is part of their plan’
The haphazard nature of the return of detainees and corpses helps explain why no reliable accounting exists. Although the ICRC is uniquely mandated under international humanitarian law to facilitate prisoner releases and the return of human remains, the first three shipments of unidentified bodies were all received by UN personnel. According to Ariel, CLA officials initially only notified UN workers — not the ICRC — about both detainee releases and the arrival of containers of bodies, leaving humanitarian staff to improvise a response and request ICRC assistance after the fact.
Israel’s May 2024 offensive in Rafah destroyed the warehouse for receiving detainees and permanently limited the humanitarian operations of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the area. Ultimately, the handling of detainee returns fell to the ICRC. But aid workers and researchers from other agencies interviewed for this investigation were sceptical about whether the ICRC ever had sufficient capacity or access to handle the task of accurately documenting releases and adequately supporting detainees.
According to several aid workers familiar with the process, ICRC staff often arrived at the reception warehouses on the Gaza side of the crossing after detainees had already been assisted by UN workers, or with too few personnel to properly interview returnees. On some occasions, staff failed to arrive when they said they would, citing shortage of personnel and resources.
“Where was the ICRC in all of this?” asked a former senior UNRWA official who requested anonymity. “[They were] non-existent. Why didn’t they come?”
With no one else stepping in, UNRWA staff ultimately assumed responsibility for receiving returning detainees and bodies in the first months of the war. They characterized that process as entirely improvised.
Before humanitarian aid resumed through Karem Abu Salem on December 17, 2023, Israel released detainees at the crossing without advance notice, and UN workers often only learned of their arrival after they had crossed back into Gaza.
The UN did not begin systematically recording the return of detainees until that month, after Ariel was confronted with the unexpected arrival of 70 traumatized and abused detainees. “They were hysterical,” Ariel said. “You couldn’t console them. They didn’t know where they were, what they were doing.”
Among this group of detainees were an 85-year-old man who had been tortured, a blind man who had been starved, and a man with pins holding together his shattered legs.
Disturbed by what they saw, Ariel pushed the CLA for advance warning of future releases. Although well outside the scope of their official responsibilities, Ariel and other humanitarians converted a warehouse into a makeshift reception center and scrambled to secure food, blankets, toothbrushes, and whatever else they could obtain to ease the detainees’ transition.
But although Ariel and their colleagues mobilized resources to support the detainees, the return system remained erratic due to Israel’s refusal to meet its obligations to provide sufficient information. When notice of returns came at all, the CLA typically informed UN staff late at night that detainees would arrive at 6 a.m. the following morning, often supplying inaccurate headcounts. Scheduled releases were sometimes cancelled without explanation.
“Everything is spontaneous — and that is part of their plan,” Ariel said, expressing their belief that the administrative chaos was calculated to prevent aid workers from comprehensively attending to returning detainees.
At times, humanitarian workers were permitted to bring buses to the crossing. But on other occasions, the CLA forced detainees — all of whom exhibited signs of malnutrition, abuse, and medical neglect — to walk barefoot across the three-kilometer corridor separating the Israeli and Palestinian sides of Karem Abu Salem.
During one release, the CLA prevented aid workers from bringing a wheelchair to transport a 12-year-old boy who had been shot in the legs while searching for food for his family. Sometimes, Israeli soldiers manning the crossing shot at the ground to induce the detainees to run, according to multiple aid workers who observed this firsthand.
‘Is it my brother ? Is it my father ?’
As a result of the haphazard return process, the record has been incomplete from the outset.
UN workers stationed at the Gaza side of Karem Abu Salem helped facilitate detainee releases throughout the first six months of the war; UNRWA’s last comprehensive count dates back to April 2024, shortly before it lost reliable access to the crossing and surrounding area. Releases varied widely in frequency, occurring anywhere from twice a week to once every three weeks, according to several UNWRA employees. Groups ranged from five to 100 detainees and sometimes included women, elderly people, and children as young as 12.
Even after the ad hoc system had been established, aid workers said some releases occurred entirely outside of it, which would have gone entirely unrecorded. Humanitarian staff reported witnessing unregistered detainees walking back from the Erez crossing, which was closed to aid workers throughout the war, and the Gate 96 crossing, which the Rafah invasion rendered inaccessible. “There has to be a substantial gap in the number of people that got registered and assisted,” said one UN staffer who requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.
The lack of transparency about releases is impossible to separate from Israel’s obfuscation of much more basic information about who had been detained in the first place, where they were being held, and how many had died in custody. According to Naji Abbas, director of the prisoners and detainees department at Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI), it took the Israeli military seven months merely to respond to the organization’s request for the number of detainees who had died in military detention facilities.
As of now, 104 Palestinians, including 70 from Gaza, are confirmed to have died in IPS and military custody, according to Abbas. But PHRI believes the true number is far greater, in part because the army refused to provide information about detainees in its custody for the first nine months of the war. In that period, Abbas told +972 Magazine, Israel exercised “a systematic policy of killing Palestinians [in Israeli custody].”
“The system of detainee registration, and then the system of information dissemination, are both very, very messy and flawed,” said Avshalom Matalon, who researches enforced disappearances of Palestinians for HaMoked. Matalon added that the process should have been overseen by the ICRC, but Israel banned the organization from visiting Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons and concealed information about their whereabouts throughout the war, inhibiting one of the only mechanisms of accountability.
“You will not get the exact numbers anywhere except from the Israeli authorities,” Ajith Sunghay, who heads the UN Human Rights Office in Palestine, told +972 Magazine. In the absence of such figures, Palestinians in Gaza are left to try to make sense of what fate befell their loved ones alone.
“People are asking about their relatives and their families who are detained,” said one aid worker from Gaza. “Imagine having about 500 [bodies] in these containers. Is it my brother? Is it my father? Who are these people?”
Neither the Israeli army nor the IPS responded to requests for comment. The ICRC declined multiple requests for comment.
Frances Brogan is a senior at Princeton University and a Managing Editor of The Daily Princetonian
