Settlers Force Palestinian Family to Exhume Father's Grave Near Jenin

Mohammed Asasa had just returned home after burying his 80-year-old father Hussein when children burst into the house shouting that settlers were digging up the grave.

The incident took place in Asasa, a small village near Jenin in the West Bank. The family patriarch, who gave the village its name, died last Friday from natural causes. A former livestock trader and father of 10 children, Hussein was a highly regarded figure. Following Islamic custom, he was buried in a simple plot in the graveyard on a small hill across from the family home.

Mohammed said he had even obtained permission from a nearby Israeli military base to ensure the funeral proceeded without issues. Less than half an hour later, he and his brothers returned to the cemetery entrance. They watched in shock as a group of Jewish settlers, some armed, hacked at the new grave with heavy hand tools.

After initial attempts to negotiate, Mohammed rushed to the grave as the settlers neared breaking through the last slab protecting his father's remains. "They were on the point of reaching the body," Mohammed said. "I'm sure they were about to remove it, so we had to make a decision there and then."

The settlers came from Sa-Nur, a recently reestablished settlement on the hill above the cemetery. Although all settlements on Palestinian land violate international law, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government recently permitted Sa-Nur's reoccupation as part of its push to expand and create new outposts in the occupied West Bank.

Mobile phone footage captured family members digging up the grave themselves after armed settlers with automatic rifles warned: "Either you exhume the body or we'll do it." The settlers claimed the burial site sat too close to their settlement. Images showed Mohammed and his brothers carrying their father's shrouded body down the hill to safety under the settlers' gaze.

The Israeli army later stated it intervened to confiscate the settlers' digging tools and prevent further tension. The family accused soldiers of standing by while settlers forced them to empty the grave in an unceremonious and humiliating manner.

In a statement to the BBC, the Israel Defense Forces said it "condemns any attempt to act in a manner that harms public order, the rule of law, and the dignity of the living and the deceased."

The UN human rights office called the incident "appalling and emblematic of the dehumanisation of Palestinians" in the Occupied Territories. Ajith Sunghay, local head of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said, "It spares no-one, dead or alive."

Locals linked the event to rising tensions since Sa-Nur's reestablishment. "It's terrible, they think they own the whole area, now that they've moved back in," one guest at Hussein's mourning tent said.

Another Asasa sibling noted that soldiers and settlers recently invaded land owned by a relative and removed olive trees for no clear reason. After settlers brought mobile homes to Sa-Nur, next to an IDF base, much of the area became a "closed military area."

Villagers say this blocks access to olive groves, crop fields and even the cemetery. Even when access is coordinated with the IDF, settlers act aggressively, many now carrying guns openly.

Settler violence has surged across the West Bank amid global focus on other wars. The New York Times reported that from the start of the US-Israeli war against Iran through the end of April, settlers killed 13 Palestinians, injured hundreds and drove many from their homes.