The procedures for receiving the container were suspended until Israel provides full data with the victims’ names, time of death and the location they were taken from, the ministry said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app on Wednesday.

This is “the minimum rights of these people and their families”, it said.

Gaza’s Government Media Office called the shipment of unidentifiable bodies an “inhumane and criminal move”, in a separate statement.

Reporting from central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said “the bodies are unidentifiable because they are mostly decomposed”.

“There are signs that those bodies have been in Israel for a long time,” he said.

“The Palestinian Health Ministry said that the Israeli military has deliberately concealed the identity of those Palestinian people. There is no information about their names, genders and the location they have been kidnapped from. The circumstances of their abduction from the Gaza Strip are also unclear,” he added.

The Palestinian Civil Defence said on Wednesday that at least 53 Palestinians have been killed across the Gaza Strip in Israeli attacks on their homes and shelters in the past 24 hours.

One person was killed overnight on Wednesday after a house was targeted in Beit Lahiya in the north of the enclave, and in the Nuseirat refugee camp, two Palestinians were killed when their tent was hit by an Israeli air strike.

Those killed in central Gaza’s Nuseirat were from the al-Ejla family who lost 11 relatives in August.