This study examines how Palestinian dead bodies and spaces of death in occupied East Jerusalem are ‘hot spots’ of criminality. The arguments raised challenge traditional hot-spot theories of crime that build their definition of criminality around official state statistics and information and visible spaces of crime. The paper offers a bottom-up analysis of crimes against the dead and their families in East Jerusalem, examining the manner in which modes of denial, the logic of elimination and accumulation by dispossession shape experiences of death and dying in a colonial context.