The Israeli government withholds unknown numbers of bodies of Palestinian and Arab war victims, killed throughout the years of struggle, confrontation, and opposition. For this purpose, the Israeli Authorities created, in addition to morgues, cemeteries called the “Cemetery of Numbers”. Only four of them have been identified to date.

These secret cemeteries are formed with bare graves surrounded by stones. A mere metal plate with a number for identification, instead of a name, figures on top of each grave. Grave stones are non-existent. Files, which are organized to each number and contains personal information of the buried victim, has been covert by the Israeli Army.

In the last few years, Israeli and international investigative journalists have found evidence on the existence of four such cemeteries:

A cemetery located near the Banat Yacoub Bridge in a military area bordering Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. Allegedly it contains approximately 500 graves of Palestinians and Lebanese killed in 1982 and onward.
A cemetery located in a closed military area between Jericho and Adam Bridge on the Jordan River. It is surrounded by a wall with an iron gate and a billboard inscribed “A Cemetery for the Dead of the Enemy”. It contains more than one hundred graves bearing numbers from 5003 to 5007. It is unknown whether they are serial numbers assigned to individuals or, as Israel claims, administrative codes unrelated to the real number of buried bodies.
The Cemetery of Refedeem in the Jordan Valley. Details unavailable.
The Cemetery of Shuheitar, located near Wadi Al Hamam, a village north of Galilee between Mount Ariel and the Lake of Galilee. Most of the bodies in this cemetery belongs to war victims killed in the Jordan Valley battles in the years 1965 to 1975. In the north side of this cemetery, 30 graves are divided between two rows, while the remaining 20 are situated in the central area. Shamefully, all these graves are sandy and shallow, which when exposed to rain, allows bodies to be vulnerable and dragged by stray animals.

The Cemetery of Numbers are a slur to the dignity of mankind for both the dead and the living. Their existence contravenes international humanitarian laws. It is a loud cry calling for an intervention from the international public opinion. The bodies of the innocent must be retrieved, and their families must be granted the right to give their family members and loved ones a decent burial in line with national traditions and religious rites.