Israel Dug Up 200 Palestinian Graves to Find One Israeli Body

To retrieve one body, Israel deployed tanks, drones, and what locals called "explosive robots." They dug up approximately 200 Palestinian graves. They killed 4 more civilians in the process.

This was the price paid to recover Ran Gvili, an Israeli policeman who died over two years ago—the last Israeli captive in Gaza after more than two years of what many call Israel's genocidal war on the besieged enclave.

On Monday, Benjamin Netanyahu hailed the operation as a triumph of commitment. But just meters away from where Gvili's remains were carefully extracted and airlifted to Israel for dignified burial, a grimmer reality persists: over 10,000 Palestinians remain entombed under Gaza's rubble, decomposing in silence, without identity, without recovery missions, without global outcry.

The Arithmetic of Grief

The disparity was visceral from the start. Journalist Khamis al-Rifi, who reported from near the al-Batsh cemetery in Gaza City's Tuffah neighborhood, described the overwhelming force used to isolate the area.

"It started with exploding robots and air strikes... clearing the path for the tanks," al-Rifi told Al Jazeera. Approaching the cemetery became impossible as tanks enforced a deadly perimeter, firing at anything that moved. Artillery and helicopters created what he called a "wall of fire" to protect the engineering units inside.

For two days, Israeli forces churned up the earth in this sealed "kill zone." "They dug up about 200 graves," al-Rifi said. "They pulled the martyrs out, tested them one by one until they found the [Israeli] body."

While Israel used satellite technology and DNA labs to close this chapter, Palestinian families are denied even basic digging equipment. According to the National Committee for Missing Persons, Gaza has become "the world's largest graveyard."

When Death Has Different Values

The aftermath revealed the starkest contrast. Gvili's remains were airlifted for proper burial in Israel. The Palestinian bodies? Left to bulldozers.

"When citizens went to the area [after the withdrawal], they found the martyrs put back randomly... covered with sand by the bulldozers," al-Rifi reported. "Some bodies were still visible on the surface."

Alaa al-Din al-Aklouk, spokesperson for the National Committee for Missing Persons, highlighted what he called the "fatal injustice" of an international community that mobilized resources for Israeli captives while blocking the entry of heavy civil defense equipment needed to recover Palestinian victims.

"These martyrs are buried under the rubble of their homes... without their last dignity being preserved," al-Aklouk said last November.

Mustafa Barghouti, secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative, told Al Jazeera that while he respects any family's right to bury their dead, "the lack of equal treatment, the lack of respect to Palestinians as equal human beings, is really astonishing."

The Cost of Closure

The operation's dark irony? It created new victims. On Tuesday morning, as residents approached the desecrated cemetery to check on their loved ones' graves, Israeli fire struck again.

"Four martyrs fell in the area this morning," al-Rifi said. One was his own relative, Youssef al-Rifi, who had simply gone to inspect the destruction left behind.

In its quest to heal a wound that has shaken Israel's national psyche since October 2023, the operation opened new graves in 2026. It serves as a grim microcosm of the entire war: the sanctity of one side's life and death upheld at the absolute expense of the other's.

The Global Silence

While international media rushed to cover Gvili's recovery, the 10,000+ Palestinians under the rubble remain largely invisible. There are no explosive robots clearing paths for them, no forensic teams flying in to identify them, no armies mobilizing for their dignity.

Families grieve without closure, their missing presumed dead but never confirmed, never recovered, never mourned with the ceremony that every human deserves.