Bodies on the Move: The Truth Behind IDF’s Military Training

posted on: Jun 3, 2026

By Mitzi Tapang / Arab America Contributing Writer

This article contains sensitive content that may be distressing to some readers, including graphic descriptions of violence, massacres, genocide, mass graves, and the obstruction of human remains. Readers experiencing trauma or grief related to mass atrocities are encouraged to take care and seek support if needed. 

International humanitarian law (IHL) establishes a bright-line distinction between “military objectives,” those legitimately identified as targets and “civilian objects,” those strictly protected or ought to be, in pressing circumstances. The Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I explicitly protect hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and other civilian infrastructure from direct attack. 

However, this protection is routinely undermined through the manipulation of legal categories, which has come to be known as the critical mechanism of “dual-use objects.” The term, becoming common despite having no formal legal standing in the Geneva Conventions, had nonetheless become a porous category encompassing everything from bridges and electrical grids to apartment buildings used for weapons storage, banks, bakeries, and oil refineries whose proceeds support armed forces. 

Research on Gaza hospitals reveals a pattern that reflects a pre-scripted narrative used to “retroactively justify systematic killings and destruction.” Under such a pattern, civilian infrastructure is struck first, then declared after the fact to have been an “operational node” or “human shields” location, and the massacre is transformed into “proportionate responses” or tragic errors rather than targeting campaigns. 

Donated cadavers for IDF military training

An investigative report published September 30, 2025 by four student journalists from Annenberg Media at USC revealed two U.S. universities—University of Southern California (USC) and University of California, San Diego (UCSD)—selling donated bodies to the U.S. Navy for Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) military training without donors’ informed consent. 

Over $860,000 was uncovered in Navy payments to USC for at least 89 fresh cadaver bodies, 32 of which were specifically used to train IDF surgical teams at the Navy Trauma Training Center within Los Angeles General Medical Center. 

The investigation also highlighted that while universities describe the program as “life-saving medical training,” internal documents show sessions involve “perfused” cadavers, bodies pumped with artificial blood to simulate battlefield trauma from gunshot wounds and Improvised Explosive Device (IED) blasts. The “hands-on training,” earned USC over $1 million in the last decade while families who donated remains through USC’s Anatomic Gift Program and UCSD’s Body Donation Program were never informed of the military applications. 

I certainly don’t think she would be thrilled.
– Sarah Penna, noting her grandmother (a WWII flight nurse) supported Palestinian statehood and opposed war. 

Despite outcry and calls for independent inquiry, the Navy filed notice to extend the cadavers contract through September 2026 and by extension the million-dollar USC contract. 

“Human shields” legal cover 

The “human shields” accusation is prohibited under IHL when used to describe civilians, yet militaries increasingly apply it to entire civilian spaces: 

The term ‘human shields’ describes a method of warfare prohibited by IHL where the presence of civilians… is used in order to shield military objectives from attack.

This prohibition is inverted when applied to vast swathes of infrastructure. Through the classification of entire hospitals or refugee camps as containing “human shields,” the protection attaches to an alleged military function rather than the civilian population. 

Once a site is retroactively designated as a military objective, the IHL’S principle of proportionality is distorted, as it required that incidental civilian harm not be “excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” Civilian deaths become merely “collateral damage” in an effort to replace systematic campaigns in official narratives.

Erosion of protections

A Yale Law study documents that dual-use targeting has expanded dramatically since the 1991 Gulf War, with the United States and Israel playing critical roles in normalizing this practice.

Rather than prompting caution in targeting, dubbing objects ‘dual-use’ had had the effect of creating a porous category of targetable objects that are obviously critical to civilian life and yet are lawfully targetable—including traditionally protected objects such as private homes, schools, and hospitals.

In Gaza specifically, 85% of school buildings were directly hit or damaged as of July of 2025. 33 of 36 hospitals were damaged or destroyed, with Israel defending attacks as justified by alleged militant use. Independent reporting found Israel presented “little or even no evidence” of significant Hamas presence in most cases. 

Rafah Paramedic Mass massacre

A joint investigation by Forensic Architecture and Earshot, released February 24, 2026, reconstructed the IDF’s’ March 23, 2025 attack on a clearly marked humanitarian medical convoy in Gaza. The account follows Israeli soldiers positioned on elevated ground with unobstructed line of sight, firing at least 844 rounds (later referenced as over 900 bullets) in the first 5 minutes alone. 

The firing continued for over 5 minutes, killing 15 Palestinian aid workers. It was followed by close-range shootings and heavy machinery used to crush and bury vehicles and bodies in shallow mass graves to hide the scene. 

The same investigation also examined the Israeli attack on aid workers in Tel al-Sultan, where they ambushed a second ambulance, killing two additional aid workers attempting to deliver food, water, and medical supplies to starving civilians despite conspicuous emergency lighting. 

Evidentiary collapse

The Annenberg Media exposé was subsequently amplified by AJ+’s Dena Takruri in a viral Instagram reel posted May 11, 2026, demonstrating that the obstruction of bodies is not isolated to Gaza but part of a transnational system of human remains instrumentalized for military purposes. 

According to Euro-Med Monitor, Israel maintains a longstanding practice of detaining the remains of deceased Palestinians. In Gaza, the Israeli army currently hold more than 145 Palestinian bodies in morgues. 255 are buried approximately in the Numbers Cemetery near the Jordanian border—off-limits to the public—keeping remains in subfreezing temperature (sometimes below 40°F) to ensure they stay undisturbed and possibly hide organ theft. 

The bodies are marked only with metal plated as “enemy combatant graves,” constituting collective punishment that violates Hague Regulations Art. 50 and Geneva Convention Art. 33, while families cannot bury their dead, cannot identify remains, and funerals and grieving are rendered all but impossible. 

Since the inception of Israel’s genocide on Palestinian lives and land, the obstruction of bodies has been phenomenologically and structurally tied to an evidentiary collapse, as an intentional mechanism of erasure. This sensory and ritual deprivation produces a void where evidence should exist. The body itself, which in normal circumstances would serve as the primary witness to violence, is reduced to being both simultaneously invisible and inaccessible. So long as the families cannot be comforted, the perpetrators cannot be held accountable. 

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