A Palestinian human rights lawyer revealed that Israel is holding in refrigerators the bodies of 80 Palestinian martyrs, in addition to the bodies of 254 others in the “Numbers Cemetery”.
Issam al-Arouri, director of the Jerusalem Center for Legal Aid (non-governmental), said that “Israel began holding the bodies of Palestinian martyrs in refrigerators since 2015, and is now holding 80 bodies.”
On Wednesday, the occupation soldiers killed a Palestinian woman in the town of Hizma, north of Jerusalem, after killing another Palestinian woman on Saturday at the Qalandia crossing north of the city, without releasing their bodies.
Al-Arouri added that the occupation authorities also continue to “detain 254 other bodies in the numbers cemetery, some of them since the seventies of the last century.”
The term “cemeteries of numbers” refers to simple burials, in which a metal plate bearing a number, not the name of the martyr, is installed above each grave, and each number has a special file about the martyr kept by the Israeli security authority.
The director of the Al-Quds Center, a human rights center that handles the legal side in the battle to retrieve the bodies of the martyrs, explained that the file “is currently stuck with the Israeli side for political reasons,” noting that “the Israeli cabinet’s decision is not to release any bodies, as long as there are soldiers detained in Gaza.”
The Cabinet decided on October 13, 2015 to return to holding the bodies of the martyrs, after moving the file before that, and to release dozens of bodies by judicial decisions.
While the cabinet’s decision at the time talked about holding the bodies of martyrs who carried out or attempted to carry out operations, Al-Arouri mentioned that of the eighty bodies, only 6 belonged to prisoners who were martyred in captivity.
Hamas keeps 4 Israelis, including two soldiers who were captured during the war on Gaza in the summer of 2014 (without disclosing their fate or health status), and the other two who entered Gaza in unclear circumstances during the past years.
In September 2019, the Israeli Supreme Court issued a decision allowing the military commander to detain the bodies of Palestinian martyrs and bury them temporarily for the purposes of their future use as negotiating papers.
Al-Arouri does not expect a change in the Israeli position after the formation of a new government, on Sunday, “because the competition is currently over who is more extremist and racist towards the Palestinians,” he said.