WEST BANK — Israeli squatters forced a Palestinian family to dig out the freshly buried corpse of their father from a cemetery in the village of al-Asasa in the occupied West Bank last week.
The Israelis said the grave was too close to the recently re-established settlement of Sa-Nur, near Jenin, which is located around 300 metres from the burial site in a long-standing cemetery on privately owned Palestinian land, and therefore had to go.
The family of Hussein Asasa was on Friday forced to go through the dehumanising process “despite the burial having been coordinated in advance with Israeli security forces,” according to Haaretz.
Soon after the burial, squatters started digging the grave, leading to a confrontation with the family members of the deceased. This prompted the Israeli army to confiscate the squatters’ digging tools. However, the family members were forced to exhume the body themselves and transfer it to another cemetery. The entire process was overseen by the Israeli army.
Not content with their ghastly act of forcing a family to exhume their relative’s body, the squatters even threw stones at the grieving family.
“This is appalling and emblematic of the dehumanisation of Palestinians that we see unfolding across the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territories],” Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN human rights office in Palestine, said. “It spares no one, dead or alive.”
Sa-Nur, which abuts the burial site, is one of the four settlements that were evacuated in 2005 and that are now being resettled as part of the ongoing annexation campaign in the West Bank. The Israeli state has been confiscating huge swathes of Palestinian land, forcing natives out of their ancestral homes and demolishing structures to replace them with Jewish-only settlements.
State-backed violence against Palestinians in the West Bank has escalated significantly since the start of Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip in October 2023. The violence has continued to intensify. This year alone, at least 42 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by the Israeli military, squatters, or a combination of the two.
Children have borne the brunt of the Jewish assault. A report published last month documented the killing of at least 27 Palestinian children in the West Bank in 2026. The report described the slaughter of children as “not isolated incidents, but rather part of a broader policy and practice of excessive use of force, rooted in unlawful rules of engagement that seek to cement Israel’s settler colonial apartheid regime as it pursues its genocide against the Palestinian people.”
Maj Gen Avi Bluth, the Israeli army chief in the West Bank, recently admitted that his troops were killing Palestinians with total impunity. “We’re killing like we haven’t killed since 1967,” he said, boasting about the violence in the West Bank.
Grave Desecrations, an Israeli Specialty
One of the features of Israeli barbarism in occupied Palestine has been the way Israelis treat dead Palestinians. The desecration of graves has been a hallmark of unbridled Israeli savagery. During the genocide in the Gaza Strip, Israeli troops regularly desecrated graves and stole the bodies of freshly buried Palestinians. Some bodies were returned with vital organs missing.
At the start of the so-called ceasefire last October, Israelis returned the bodies of Palestinians in unrecognisable states. Nearly all the bodies bore marks of horrific abuse, showing signs of prolonged shackling, blindfolding, hanging, burning, and shooting from close range. Most of them had been stuffed with cotton gauze in place of vital organs. The vast majority of the bodies were so badly disfigured that they had to be buried without identification in mass graves.
Families of missing Palestinians had to endure long and repeated journeys to hospitals receiving bodies in search of their loved ones, without success.
The Israeli practice of desecrating Muslim cemeteries goes back decades. Israelis routinely excavate graves to make way for construction projects. In 2021, they started exhuming bodies from the historic al-Yusufiya cemetery — whose construction was ordered by Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub in the 12th century and which is likely named after him — in occupied Jerusalem to make way for a biblical theme park.
A mother’s desperate attempts to protect her son’s grave in al-Yusufiya in 2021 highlighted the barbarism Palestinians — both living and dead — face at the hands of Israeli squatters on their own land.
“Pour the earth over me and bury me beside him, oh my son Alaa, I am here, I will not leave,” Ola Nababta cried out as the Israelis attempted to pull her away from her son’s grave.
“Nine months after Alaa’s death, the Israeli Ministry of Health tried to persuade me to move his body to another cemetery, but I adamantly refused because I want Alaa’s body to rest in peace,” she later said.
“What makes them think I will allow them to cover his tomb and deprive me of the opportunity of visiting him and watering the flowers I have planted above his grave?” — Palestine Will Be Free
