[News] 'Waiting is the worst part': Families of slain Palestinians withheld by Israel continue their fight

[Anti-Imperialist News]

*'Waiting is the worst part': Families of slain Palestinians withheld by 
Israel continue their fight*


July 5, 2016 - http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=772124


By: Jaclynn Ashly

JERUSALEM (Ma'an) -- “We are hopeful,” Muhammad Elayyan said, as a few 
dozen Palestinians trickled into the quiet halls of Israel’s Supreme 
Court in Jerusalem on Monday. “These days, we have to see the glass as 
half full. We must stay hopeful.”

Elayyan is the father of one of seven slain Palestinians whose bodies 
are currently locked inside refrigerators in Israel’s mortuary in Jaffa, 
withheld from their grieving families since they were killed by Israeli 
forces after carrying out or allegedly carrying out attacks on Israelis.

Family members of the slain Palestinians and their supporters crowded 
into the Israeli courtroom, eagerly awaiting a decision on whether the 
bodies of their loved ones would be released to them, after months of 
appeals to the courts.

Courtroom guards periodically scolded attendees to quiet down during the 
hearing, as Hebrew-speaking Palestinians tried to quickly translate for 
those who couldn’t understand, while one man bowed his head in anxious 
anticipation and quietly recited Islamic prayers.

After a few minutes of private deliberation, the Supreme Court judges 
announced their decision to once again delay the release of the bodies 
until a government legal adviser was consulted, whose proposed 
resolution to the case is expected to be submitted to the courts by July 
11, when a final decision could be made.

“The waiting is the worst part,” Elayyan, whose slain son Bahaa Elayyan 
has been held by Israel for more than eight months, told Ma’an outside 
the courtroom after the decision was announced, as his visibly 
disappointed wife stood by his side. “It is important for us to bury our 
loved ones so that we can say goodbye, and then move on with our lives.”

“Israel has made it so we are frozen in the stage of mourning. We have 
been mourning since October when our son was killed,” Elayyan said. “And 
we will continue to mourn until his body is finally returned to us and 
we can properly say goodbye.”

Israeli authorities dramatically escalated their policy of withholding 
slain Palestinian bodies since a wave of unrest swept across the 
Palestinian territory and Israel in October, so far leaving more than 
220 Palestinians and some 32 Israelis killed.

The United Nations released a report in May stating that Israeli 
authorities have prohibited autopsies from being conducted on 
Palestinian corpses, and that the bodies were kept in poor and inhumane 
conditions, “stacked on top of each other.”

“The bodies returned to the families are often disfigured, sometimes 
beyond recognition, denying the families the right to accord, with 
dignity, final religious rites,” the report read.

Human rights organizations have also widely condemned the policy, with 
prisoners’ rights group Addameer calling it a form of “collective 
punishment” against Palestinians who had not been accused of any 
wrongdoing, also noting that it “adds to the severe grief and trauma of 
families of the deceased.”

Following the backlash and an appeal submitted on behalf of the families 
by Muhammad Mahmoud, an Addameer lawyer, the Israeli Supreme Court in 
May ordered the release of nine Palestinian bodies, including 
22-year-old Bahaa Elayyan.

The mother of Bahaa Elayyan, center, waits outside a courtroom on July 
4, 2016. (MaanImages/Jaclynn Ashly)

The ruling recommended that the bodies be returned by June 6, the start 
of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

However, Israel’s Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan ordered that 
Israeli police suspend the return of the bodies just a few weeks after 
the ruling, claiming that the funeral of Alaa Abu Jamal had encouraged 
“incitement” against the Israeli state.

Seven months after 22-year-old Abu Jamal was killed by Israeli forces 
after carrying out an attack on Israeli civilians in October, his 
funeral was held in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabal 
al-Mukabbir.

Like other Palestinian families, Abu Jamal’s family were forced to abide 
by Israeli-imposed preconditions to hold the ceremony, including having 
to pay the Israeli state more than $10,000 as collateral against 
potential “incitement” and limiting the number of attendees to 50 people 
-- conditions which Erdan said were violated during the funeral.

Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers were heavily deployed throughout the procession.

Funeral attendees had chanted “God is great,” a phrase used regularly 
during Muslim funerals, as well as “with our souls, with our blood, we 
sacrifice ourselves for you, martyr,” a variation on a popular Arabic 
political slogan.

Erdan called the scene "inadmissible by all standards and measurements 
everywhere, the more so in the capital Jerusalem," in reference to the 
contested status of the holy city as the exclusive capital of the Jewish 
state of Israel, which is not recognized by the international community.

His decision effectively halted the implementation of the Supreme Court 
ruling, forcing the bereaved families, who had expected a long-awaited 
reprieve from their mourning, back into the Israeli courts.

The judges at Monday’s hearing ruled against the prosecutor's reasoning 
to halt the return of bodies due to “incitement” during Abu Jamal’s 
funeral, and also rejected the prosecutor's attempts to link a recent 
escalation of attacks to the release of Palestinian corpses.

Mahmoud, the Addameer lawyer, had attended Abu Jamal’s funeral, and 
underscored to the Israeli judges during the hearing that the conditions 
were in fact not violated during the funeral.

“We continue to accept all of the conditions set by Israel, and no one 
violated them or has plans to violate them in the future,” Mahmoud said 
to the court.

Mahmoud also announced that the families had accepted a new condition 
set by Israeli police in June that would prohibit Palestinians from 
holding funerals for the released bodies in their neighborhoods or 
villages, as the bodies would instead be buried in cemeteries chosen by 
the Israeli police.

The families’ main demand remains that exact dates be determined for the 
release of each body, while Israeli police are pushing the courts to 
allow them to exercise complete control over the timing based on 
Israel’s changing security assessments.

The prosecutor also reiterated a proposal made on Saturday night by 
Israeli leaders to build a special cemetery in Israel for Palestinians 
killed by Israeli forces to avoid returning the slain bodies to their 
families. The proposal was promptly rejected by the Supreme Court judges.

The proposal referred to what Palestinians have termed “cemeteries of 
numbers,” where Palestinians slain by Israeli forces have been buried. 
The cemeteries, where the remains of 262 Palestinians are believed to be 
held, were built in undisclosed locations in Israel, with only numbers 
marking each grave. However, the policy was reversed in 2004.

After Monday’s court hearing, member of Israel’s Parliament, the 
Knesset, Osama Saadi, said “We are demanding a simple humanitarian 
solution to this case, which is for the Israeli government to give back 
the corpses to their families so they can be buried in cemeteries.”

Saadi added that he was confident that the courts would order the 
release of the bodies in line with the ruling in May.

“We will continue to organize and resist,” Elayyan told Ma’an on his way 
out of the courthouse. “When they return our children’s bodies, then we 
will move to punish those who did this to us. We will submit a complaint 
to the international courts.”

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20160705/cc4d06e9/attachment.htm>