TEHRAN — More than 1,100 bodies recovered in Gaza since the war’s onset remain unidentified due to severe shortages of forensic equipment and Israeli restrictions on DNA testing, according to Gaza’s forensic evidence department.

The Independent reported Sunday that at least 1,129 bodies have been recovered but could not be identified, a figure officials say likely understates the scale of the problem, given that more than 71,800 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, with an estimated 10,000 others believed to remain buried under 60 million tons of rubble.

A systematic blockade of heavy machinery and forensic laboratories has exacerbated the crisis.

According to the Red Cross, only one fully functional digger remains in the enclave to clear the bullet-scarred ruins. Of the 360 bodies returned through mediation during a brief ceasefire, only 101 were identified.

Gaza’s forensics chief, Mahmoud Ashour, said that without DNA kits, families are left in a state of “ambiguous loss,” often crowding around the same decomposed body in a desperate, often futile, attempt to find their loved ones.

Compounding this grief are harrowing statements from the Gaza Health Ministry. Dr. Munir Al-Bursh reported that many returned bodies bore signs of execution and torture.

Furthermore, health ministry officials have said that Israel has engaged in organ harvesting, citing corpses returned with missing vital organs and cavities filled with cloth.

These claims echo the 2009 admission by the former head of Israel’s Abu Kabir Forensic Institute, who acknowledged that pathologists routinely harvested skin and organs from Palestinians in the 1990s without consent.

Today, Israel continues to withhold at least 766 identified Palestinian bodies in military refrigerators and “cemeteries of numbers”—unmarked graves in restricted zones.

In 2019, Israel’s Supreme Court upheld the policy of using these remains as “bargaining chips” for future negotiations.

For the bereaved in Gaza, this denial of forensic tools and the retention of the dead represent a final, agonizing layer of collective punishment.