JPA/Hibernate - Prevent deletion in PreRemove handler?

The question title basically says it all. Is it possible in JPA/Hibernate to gracefully prevent the deletion of an entity from the database? What I would like is to flag the entity as "hidden" instead of actually removing it.

I also want the Cascade semantics to be preserved, such that if I try to delete an entity that owns a collection of some other entity, the owning entity and every entity in its collection get marked as hidden without any extra work being necessary on my part, beyond implementing the @PreRemove handler that prevents the deletion and marks the entity as hidden.

Is this possible, or do I need to figure out some other approach?