Human remains, funerals, and graves are all symbols of the ultimate end of life. Their absence, however, disturbs the social perceptions of death and thus initiates cultural and political negotiations over notions of personhood and viability. The article offers a critical discourse analysis of four case studies of Israeli soldiers who were killed in battle and whose bodies were subsequently taken hostage, in addition to soldiers and citizens whose bodies are being held in Gaza following the October 7^th war. Despite clear evidence of the hostages’ deaths, their ontological state is negotiated by various social and political actors. These necropolitical negotiations demonstrate how the absence of a corpse becomes a political resource for constructing states of certainty and uncertainty, death and “non-death”. In this necropolitical context, sovereignty is not only a matter of sovereignty over the body but rather sovereignty in the absence of a body. Moreover, this state demonstrates how political power influences not only ontological life and death but the epistemology of life and death.