Detaining the bodies of Palestinian martyrs.. A punishment that has doubled since October 7 | Politics

RamallahFor a whole year, Samaher Abu Naasa’s wish was to bury her martyred son Khalil in a grave, to distinguish him with a headstone prepared by the family after his martyrdom, and to be able to plant flowers around him like the rest of the martyrs’ families in Jenin camp.

Today, this wish has doubled to include her second son, Uday, who was martyred on August 25 after being shot at the entrance to the city of Salfit in the northern West Bank. Samaher told Al Jazeera Net, “I fear that the fate of his body will be like his brother’s, and my grief over them will remain open.”

Although the family knows very well where Khalil's body is being held – in the occupation's refrigerators at the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv – this is not the case for his brother. Since October 7, the occupation has refused to provide any information about the location of the bodies of Palestinian martyrs. The mother says, “All we have received about Uday is that he was martyred, without any details about the nature of his injury or the location of his body.”

149 Palestinian families, like the mother of the two martyrs Abu Naasa, are living under the occupation’s detention of the bodies of their children since the war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, including 20 children and 4 women, which constitutes half the number of bodies detained since the occupation returned to the policy of detaining bodies in 2015.

On the National Day for the Recovery of Martyrs’ Bodies and the Disclosure of the Fate of the Missing, organized by the National Campaign for the Recovery of Martyrs’ Bodies on August 27 of each year, the campaign said that Israel has been holding 552 bodies of Palestinian martyrs in its refrigerators or in “cemeteries of numbers” since 1967, 296 of them after the return of the policy of detaining bodies in 2015, including 32 prisoners who were martyred inside Israeli prisons and whose identities are known.

According to the campaign, these numbers do not include the bodies of martyrs from the Gaza Strip, as there are more than 60 martyrs in prisons whose identities are unknown, and 1,500 in the notorious Sde Teiman camp, whose fate is also unknown.

Pictures of prisoners who were martyred in the occupation prisons and whose bodies were detained by the occupation during a protest in the city of Al-Bireh in the central West Bank (Al Jazeera)

Linking the file to the prisoner deal

Campaign coordinator Hussein Shujaiya says that the location and circumstances of the detention of all the bodies after October 7 are still unknown. Despite all the legal follow-ups undertaken by the campaign and other Palestinian parties, the occupation refuses to disclose information and links the file to a possible exchange deal with the resistance.

In an interview with Al Jazeera Net, Shujaiya believes that the policy of detaining bodies has complex goals:

  • On the one hand, the occupation deprives the Palestinians of their right to mourn the martyrs and to bury them in funerals that turn into national occasions that move the Palestinian street.
  • On the other hand, it has political goals related to their recent exchange in the deal.

He continued, “The exchange of bodies has never been included in the deals concluded by the Palestinian resistance, but now with the presence of the bodies of Israeli dead in the Gaza Strip, the occupation is well aware that this clause will be raised.”

The occupation did not differentiate between one martyr and another in the process of detaining bodies after October 7, and there are no clear criteria for whose body is detained. Last January, the occupation detained the body of the child Ruqayyah al-Jahalin (4 years old) for 9 days before her family was able to bury her.

Coordinator of the campaign to recover the bodies of martyrs and missing persons, Hussein Shujaiya - Special Al Jazeera Net Archive
Coordinator of the campaign to recover the bodies of martyrs and missing persons, Hussein Shujaiya: Detaining the bodies of martyrs has complex goals (Al Jazeera)

On top of the list

Tulkarm and Jenin governorates top the list with the highest number of detained bodies, especially after the bombing and assassinations carried out by the occupation forces during their storming of the camps there.

In one of these raids last July, Bayan Obeid (22 years old) and her mother were martyred during a bombing that targeted a group of resistance fighters in Tulkarm camp. During the withdrawal, the Israeli forces detained her body and the bodies of two resistance fighters, so the family buried the mother without her daughter, who was standing beside her during the bombing.

Her sister, Anoud, told Al Jazeera Net that the family has not dug a grave for her next to her mother at the moment, as is the case with the families of martyrs whose bodies were held before the war, because they are certain that the occupation will not hand them over at this time, as it is using this policy to break the steadfastness of the Palestinians and double their grief over the martyrs.

She continued, “I always imagine that she is buried next to my mother. I hope that this will happen so that I can visit them and talk to them. Perhaps this will ease the sadness I feel over their separation.”

Anoud's wish – and before her the mother of Khalil and Uday Abu Naasa, and the rest of the families of the martyrs – will remain suspended until then, as Israel, which killed their loved ones, is punishing them once again by depriving them of a grave that holds them.

Khalil and Adi's mother says, “Whenever I visit the martyrs' cemetery in the camp, I feel a sense of regret and sorrow in my heart. I envy the mothers who sit next to their sons' graves.”

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