For more than half a century, Israeli authorities have withheld Palestinian bodies, burying them anonymously in concealed ‘cemeteries of numbers’. Drawing on legal records, forensic assessments and ethnographic research, this article documents systemic mismanagement that breaches the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Regulations and Israeli jurisprudence on the dignity of the dead, and examines restrictions on funerals and the erasure or repurposing of Palestinian burial grounds. Framed by necropolitics (Mbembe), necropolitical violence (Bargu) and grievability (Butler), it argues that these practices, by normalising sovereign control over death and mourning, constitute memoricide – the deliberate erasure of collective memory.