The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volkur Turk has said that the manner in which Hamas delivered bodies of Israeli hostages back to Israel was “abhorrent.” Shiri Bibas, her two children Kifir Bibas and Ariel Bibas, and Oded Lifschitz were in the coffins. The coffins were entirely black, and were presented on a stage. Behind the coffins were a number of posters, including one of Netanyahu with fangs and blood on his face. Another poster read “The Return of the War = The Return of your Prisoners in Coffins”.
In a statement, Turk said:
Under international law, any handover of the remains of deceased must comply with the prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, ensuring respect for the dignity of the deceased and their families.
Western outlets have followed suit in their coverage, with Sky News covering the story with a headline about “inhumane” treatment. The BBC ran a piece about Israeli hearts being in “tatters.”
Collective grief for Israeli hostages
The Red Cross, who were present to assist with the handover of the bodies, attempted to cover up the coffins with a screen. The International Committee of the Red cross said:
These operations should be done privately out of the utmost respect for the deceased and for those left grieving.
They concluded:
We have been unequivocal: every release — whether of the living or the deceased — must be conducted with dignity and privacy.
Responsibility
In a statement to the families of the dead hostages, Hamas said:
We would have preferred your sons to return to you alive, but your army and government leaders chose to kill them instead of bringing them back.
The Hamas spokesperson also said that all four people in the coffins were alive before:
Zionist occupation aircraft deliberately bombed the locations where they were being held.
Several reports have emerged of the Israeli military deliberately killing their own people.
Additionally, Gaza’s media office have taken the Red Cross’s statement to task for their “double standards” with Ismail Thawabta, head of media, writing on social media:
While the Red Cross holds solemn official ceremonies when receiving the bodies of Israeli hostages, it delivers the bodies of Palestinian martyrs in blue bags tossed into trucks that lack the most basic elements of human dignity.
This blatant discrimination reflects double standards and exposes the international community’s failure to achieve justice and fairness!
The context around Israeli hostages
Viewed in isolation, there isn’t much to disagree with here. No human body should be treated with indignity after death. Privacy and respect for the deceased and their loved ones form the basic standard of how bodies should be treated. However, this isn’t happening in isolation. Israel has spent the last year of its siege on Gaza, and indeed its entire history as a settler colonial entity, disrespecting Palestinian bodies with cruel and inhumane rituals.
It simply isn’t a given that every single person is treated with dignity when they die. Death doesn’t mean systems of oppression cease to exist. Poor people, Black people, Brown people, disabled people, trans people – there are untold examples of indignity in death. The context of the last year or so in particular and Israel’s treatment of dead Palestinians they’ve killed has been horrific.
Double standards
Since the return of the bodies, Israel has claimed that their analysis shows that the body in one of the coffins is not Shiri Bibas. Hamas responded to say that this is because Bibas’ remains were mixed with the remains of others amidst the rubble that her body was found in. This is undoubtedly awful for Bibas’ family and the memory of who she was. It is, however, something Palestinians have endured hundreds, if not thousands of times over.
Repeatedly, Israeli bombs have struck with such force that the remains of Palestinians have been so mixed with one another as to be indistinguishable. In August of 2024, Mondoweiss reported that:
The bodies of Palestinians killed in the latest Israeli massacre in Gaza were destroyed so far beyond recognition that doctors have only been able to give grieving families an anonymous bag of human remains to bury.
Rescuers had no choice but to designate each bag of 70kg worth of remains as one dead person.
In July 2024 Relief Web released a statement describing how:
More than 10,000 Palestinian men and women are missing under the rubble in the Gaza Strip, with no way to recover them or properly bury their remains, in a blatant violation of international law amid total international inaction to assist in their retrieval.
As of February 2025, Israel is refusing to allow into Gaza any heavy machinery. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) estimated in July 2024 that it would take 15 years just to remove the rubble produced by Israel’s incredibly heavy bombing. It’s likely that many bodies have been buried under the rubble for longer, but for some people that means their loved ones bodies have been buried under rubble for at least seven months and counting.
A 2023 Jacobin investigation found that Israel have a “practice” of:
using the bodies of slain Palestinians as bargaining chips, refusing to return them to their families. Denying the right to bury loved ones, this policy inflicts the anguish of mourning without closure.
In April 2024, UN spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani explained that a mass grave at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis had been uncovered. She continued:
Among the deceased were allegedly older people, women and wounded, while others were found tied with their hands… tied and stripped of their clothes.
Mass graves have also been uncovered at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza and in the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya
Dignity
It’s difficult to swallow Israel saying that the return of hostages has been “violation of utmost severity” given their genocide in Palestine. Within mere hours of news breaking about the manner of the return of hostages, news outlets, officials from the UN, charities, and more have released floods of content detailing the indignity and grief of such actions.
It’s been months, years, decades, since Palestinians have been mercilessly killed, abducted, detained without charge, their bodies held without cause, buried in mass graves. There isn’t any collective grief in the West over a single one of these deaths.
Supporters of Palestine have expressed their grief, but this is wholly different from the institutional acceptance of grief for Israelis. Journalist Sana Saeed summed up the situation:
This past week has felt like the first three months of the genocide – the same intensity and ferocity of genocide propaganda & manufacturing, of anti-Palestinian hatred.
Journalist Assal Rad pointed out the impact of the double standards described above:
Whether it’s Hind Rajab or Kfir and Ariel Bibas, harming any child is abhorrent. I thought we had all already agreed on that fact, then I watched people justify the slaughter of thousands upon thousands of children in Gaza. I guess a child is a child, unless they’re Palestinian.
And, Professor Asad Abukhalil said:
I am yet to see one Palestinian hostage or one Palestinian victim personalized/humanized in the Western press.
Grief for Israeli hostages is a choice
There is room in the Western psyche for considering the loss to humanity of one single Israeli life. There is room to feel an outpouring of grief for Israeli strangers, and to work to see how the rituals of death can fall heartbreakingly short.
There is no such thing for thousands upon thousands of Palestinians shot dead in humanitarian zones, buried under rubble with not even a crack of light many months later, human flesh scraped into bags weighed out to denote a person.
Grief is a choice. And, clearly, it is a political choice.
Featured image via the Canary
