Israel killed her son and held his body. Her story is one of hundreds of Palestinian families.

Nadia Khalifeh, a 55-year-old mother of five from Ein Beit el-Ma refugee camp in Nablus, wants to know if her son is dead or alive.

Gazing at the photographs of her eldest son, Walid, 30, Nadia reflects on how not knowing whether her child is dead is an especially cruel example of Israel’s collective punishment. Walid’s pictures adorn the walls of her dimly lit apartment.

She describes the night of September 26, 2024. The Israeli military informed her that they had killed her son, shooting him on the roof of their apartment block as the father of four tried to escape. But Nadia says her family saw him leave — alive — in an ambulance after being shot by soldiers.

She doubts the Ministry of Health’s report that he had died, which took months to “confirm” his death. His body has still not been returned to his family or the Palestinian authorities by Israeli forces.

“They informed us later that night that he was killed, but we have nothing that proves he’s dead,” Nadia said.

“They didn’t give us his body, and there aren’t even pictures,” she said. “His four-year-old daughter bursts into anger whenever someone tells her that her father was martyred. I have the feeling that he’s still alive, but we know it is not likely.”

Nadia fears Walid is one of 726 Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank whose bodies are being held by Israel. Israel’s policy of withholding the bodies of dead Palestinians is a decades-old practice. They are often kept in refrigerators or buried in numbered graves in the so-called “cemetery of numbers,” according to the Palestinian National Campaign for the Recovery of Martyrs’ Bodies. 

Israel is also holding an estimated 1,500 bodies of Palestinians from Gaza. Hundreds of those nameless, mutilated bodies have so far been returned to Gaza by Israeli authorities since the U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal. Families have faced the harrowing task of identifying their loved ones from piles of maimed corpses. 

The Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center (JLAC) says Israel uses the practice of seizing bodies as a weapon of war and as a means to deny Palestinians the chance to mourn lost loved ones.

Nadia’s other son, Amir, was a resistance fighter who was killed in August 2023 while battling Israeli forces. Nadia believes generations of her family are now being punished for the 24-year-old’s defiance. 

“Of course, it is collective punishment,” she says. “They’re punishing everyone related to Amir.”

“Soldiers recently caught his cousin,” she added, choosing not to name him to protect him. “They badly beat him, and told him they would enjoy killing Amir again if they could.”

She describes having lost four of her five sons to Israel’s occupation — two have been killed, while Khaled, 29, has been in Israeli prison for over a year, and Omar, 23, is wanted by Israel and is in a Palestinian Authority (PA) jail. Her husband died in 2017.

Mothers facing Nadia’s situation undergo harrowing uncertainty, particularly because some of those announced as dead by the military have later emerged alive from Israeli detention facilities or hospitals.

In March 2023, Jericho-based Hamas fighter Thaer Uweidat, 28, was pronounced dead and then later found alive, as was Basel Basbous from Ramallah. 

The body of a Balata refugee camp resident, Mahmoud Sanaqra, killed in February, has not been returned to his family, even though they are resigned to the fact that he is dead. His mother, Jamila, describes this as a method of “desecrating the body of a martyr.” 

Ein Beit el-Ma, also known as Camp Number One, is one of the oldest refugee camps in the West Bank.

The camps, once makeshift tented communities intended to be temporary, are now densely populated built-up areas housing the descendants of hundreds of thousands of refugees forcibly expelled from historic Palestine by Israel in 1948.

UNRWA says it is one of the most densely populated camps in the territory, with its 10,000 residents packed into its narrow dwellings, most of them living in poverty.

Nadia recalls the night the military raided her home and a sniper shot Walid in the leg as he tried to escape by hopping onto the roof of the neighboring apartment block.

Nadia admits she can never be certain about exactly what took place, as the soldiers had confined her to her room as they pursued Walid after restraining and beating her in front of her grandchildren — Walid’s children — as she tried to reach him.

Nadia says soldiers ripped up photos of her martyred son, Amir, and commanded their attack dog to sit on them as an insult. “They were doing all of that — destroying and sabotaging the house — while Walid was still up there bleeding and screaming, calling for me and his children,” she said. 

Nadia’s eldest son, Nasser, 31, was trying to calm her and the children, fearing their cries would prompt further violence from the soldiers, as his mother screamed and slapped herself in panic. 

Nadia recalls more shots ringing out in the night sky, and then Walid was taken away in an ambulance. This would be the last time his family would ever see him.

‘Natural conditions for resistance’

Like shrines, Walid and Amir’s pictures are emblazoned on the camp’s walls, dedicated to martyrs who have been killed by the Israeli occupation. Last Sunday, Muhammad Dawud, 42, was killed by the military and left to bleed to death in the street while emergency services were prevented from reaching him.

It is not uncommon for sons, particularly those from the camps, to shield their families from their resistance activity, often to protect them. Mothers are sometimes genuinely unaware or choose to ignore it.

Nadia insists that Walid was not involved in the resistance, unlike Amir, though an unofficial posting from the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades on Telegram — frequently used by armed groups — did pay tribute to him.

But camp residents and friends of the family say Walid did not follow the same path as his younger brother, and groups will often pay tribute to fighters’ family members, or even to those with no connections.

Other camp residents, as well as the Khalifeh family, can no longer escape Israel’s collective punishment. Though the watchful gaze of the Israeli military is usually fixed on the more populated camps in Nablus, where resistance has been more concentrated, a resident of Ein Beit el-Ma’, Mutasem Barakat, described the conditions of his community as “inhuman.”

In March, 80 families were temporarily displaced from their homes, and many were informed by Israeli soldiers that they would soon be permanently expelled from the camp. The army also told them that their homes would be destroyed to make way for a new military access road.

Barakat, whose entire family and elderly mother live in the camp, said soldiers “destroyed everything” in each house they stormed, and they “left numbers and measurements on the walls”, so they have an “inside layout” when they return to force residents out and begin construction. He says no one knows when this will be, and many now live in fear of what’s to come.

Nadia said she escaped to her brother’s home in a nearby village during the invasion because her five grandchildren were scared and crying. Luckily, she was able to return home. 

Nadia said she worries that soldiers want to destroy martyrs’ houses in particular. Israel’s policy of punitive home demolitions is another long-established form of Israeli punishment meted out to the families of martyrs across Palestine.

Khaled has been in prison for more than a year under the Israeli system of “administrative detention,” which allows Palestinians to be held in Israeli internment indefinitely without levelling any charges against the detainee. He is unable to speak to his family or to receive news that his baby daughter was born six months ago. No explanation was ever provided for his arrest, his mother says.

Nadia says that, before his death, Amir was wanted for two years over weapons charges and resistance activities.

“Amir used to laugh at the people in the resistance when he was younger; he used to find them silly — but he still became one of them,” she said.

She described life in the camp as “nothingness.” There are few ways to escape, no jobs, and no prospects for young people, she added. 

Before he was taken, Walid told Mondoweiss that his brother had “longed for martyrdom” since he was a child.

Nadia says the soldiers know her and her family well, and remember the names of those they kill, using them to torment family members who remain. 

She explains that this vacuum, filled with hatred, creates the natural conditions for resistance. “It was different with Amir when he was martyred,” Nadia said. “It was easier to make peace with it. 

“He was wanted, and he was shot many times before. I knew this was his fate — his choice,” she explained.

Amir was not affiliated with any particular group, but as a teenager, he bought his first gun and began to partake in skirmishes with the military. In August 2023, Amir went out on his motorbike, armed with his rifle, responding to what he thought was a call for support in Zawata, northwest of Nablus.

“It turned out the call he received at about 1 a.m. that night was by undercover soldiers waiting for him,” Nadia said. “Near the roundabout, he was shot repeatedly, and a soldier got close to him, put the gun right to his head, and executed him.”

His family told Mondoweiss soon after his killing that he “fought the occupation until his last breath.” They added that his ambush was well-planned to draw Amir away from the camp’s narrow alleys — perfect guerrilla fighting territory — so he couldn’t escape them as he had many times before.

There have been five martyrs from the camp since October 2023, but more than 120 in the Nablus district, mostly from other refugee camps, Balata and Askar.

“What can I do?” Nadia said. “This is my fate. God gave my sons to me, and he took them back.”

After asking about the happy memories she has with them, she retorted. “What happy memories would they have? They grew up during the Intifada,” she said. “Amir was just three years old, and his grandmother used to hide him in the closet, trying to shield him from the sound of rockets, gunfire, and bombings.”

“Happy memories? They grew up surrounded by violence, invasions, and soldiers,” she added.

In Nablus, it is almost always those in the impoverished refugee camps who sacrifice their lives to resist Israel’s occupation, whose names are called by the speakers as the city’s mosques announce yet another martyr.

Nadia, who has lived in Camp Number One her entire life, gestured to her grandson, Walid’s son, who was playing with an M16 toy rifle. 

“Look at what my grandson is holding,” she said. “This is the only future here.”

Felix Nobes is a journalist, writer, and political communications specialist based in the West Bank.

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