Israeli forces fired tear gas and sound bombs at Palestinians outside the al-Yusufiyah cemetery in occupied East Jerusalem on Friday, the latest escalation at the site, as Palestinians fight to save the cemetery from being destroyed to make way for an Israeli park.
According to local reports, groups of Palestinians gathered outside the cemetery, located right outside the walls of the Old City, to protest the construction of an Israeli park in the area, which threatens the destruction of several Palestinian grave sites.
Videos from the scene on Friday showed armed Israeli border police officers throwing tear gas and sound bombs at the crowds, while others officers violently detained young Palestinian man, and lifted their batons up in a threatening manner at people who were filming at the scene.
The attack on the demonstrators occurred after Israeli forces closed off the cemetery with metal sheets and wire fencing, in an effort to prevent a number of families from accessing the cemetery while Israeli bulldozers worked in the area.
Videos showed Israeli police attempting to forcibly remove the families, who insisted that they remain, and that they be allowed in to visit the graves of their loved ones.
One video posted on social media showed a group of Palestinian women attempting to force open the gates, but to no avail.
One of the women was Ola Nababteh, who earlier this week was filmed as she clung onto the grave of her son for dear life as Israeli police officers attempted to pry her off the gravestone.
The video, which went viral on social media, showed a tearful Nababteh as she cried, pleading with the officers, saying “go, leave me here,” as bulldozers razed the earth around her.
According to Reuters, Arieh King, Jerusalem deputy mayor and a leader of the right-wing settler movement in Jerusalem, said there was “never any intent to move the grave and that police had evacuated Nababteh because she was too close to construction.”
But Nababteh expressed otherwise, telling Middle East Eye that she has been consistently harassed by Israeli authorities over the years while visiting her son’s grave, who told her that she did not receive permission to bury her son there.
So when human remains were unearthed earlier this month during Israeli construction at the site, she and other Palestinians who have relatives buried in the cemetery feared that their loved ones could be suffering a similar fate soon.
Israeli authorities claim that the remains that were unearthed belonged to “unauthorized” graves that were “illegally placed” in the cemetery over the years, and that “authorized” graves would not be affected.
For years Palestinians have been fighting against Israeli plans for parks and nature reserves, which threatened more than one Muslim cemetery in the city.
In 2018, Israeli forces dug up sites inside the Bab al-Rahma cemetery outside the Old City, as part of plans to create a trail for tourists for City of David national park, which runs through the centuries old cemetery, the final resting place to generations of Palestinians and others from the Arab world.
At the time, Mustafa Abu Zahra, Head of the Committee for the Preservation of Islamic Cemeteries in Jerusalem, told Mondoweiss that affronts on Muslim cemeteries in the city had begun as early as the 1970s.
In recent years, any attempts by Palestinians to build new graves in the cemetery were met with force by Israeli authorities, who destroyed the grave sites and restricted Palestinian access to the area.
“This is a violation of international law, and part of Israel’s ongoing Judaization of Jerusalem. This cemetery represents our culture, our life, our history, and Israel is trying to erase all of this,” he said at the time.
Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher at left-wing Israeli NGO Ir Amim, told Mondoweiss that “national Parks have been hugely misused by Israel in East Jerusalem as a one of the means to severely limit Palestinian residential areas in order to realize the Israeli demographic policy of ensuring a Jewish majority in Jerusalem,” and that the policy creates pressures that “encourage” East Jerusalemites to leave the city.
AGAIN!!!
this is not the first nor alas the final desecration by ignorant army and racist government. I will never forget reading about the (L.A.) Museum of TOLERANCE building its newest version of “tolerance” for tourists in Jerusalem…when it came time to make a PARKING LOT, Tolerance Mus construction BULL DOZED a most revered and ancient Muslim cemetery (Mamilla) removing the bones of heroes of the struggles 11th century~ whose remains were DESECRATED to demonstrate the IRONY of a zionist museum of “tolerance”… I recall the stink raised when a few gravestones in Polish Jewish cemetary were knocked over…not ‘bull dozed/destroyed’..a few yrs ago. But this?? NOT A WHISPER was published in US media….makes a MOCKERY of the word “tolerance”. Again.
see: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-180001/
It simply shows the hypocrisy and double standards yet again. If these were Jewish graves, the howls of anti-semitism, and cries of victimhood would have been deafening. iF ONLY THE ZIONISTS RESPECTED, AND TREATED OTHERS, LIKE THEY KEEP DEMANDING OTHERS TO RESPECT AND TREAT THEM. The Palestinian graves mean nothing to the occupier, and it will be trampled over just like the rights and freedom of the Palestinians. Nasty.
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Righteous Jews step forth:
Excerpt:
Israeli Jews Call: “Stop Israel’s Apartheid!” Includes video! https://jews4decolonization.wordpress.com/ Israeli Jews Call: “Stop Israel’s Apartheid!” #IsraelisAgainstApartheid. An Open Letter to the International Community
“We, Jewish Israelis, oppose the actions of the Israeli government & hereby declare our commitment to act against them. We refuse to accept the Jewish-supremacist regime & call upon the international community to immediately intervene in defense of the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, the Galilee, the Negev, al-Lydd, Yafa, Ramleh, Haifa & throughout historic Palestine.
“Jewish supremacy is the cornerstone of the Israeli regime, & its consistent objective is to transfer and obliterate the Palestinian people, their history, & their national identity. This objective manifests in continued acts of ethnic cleansing by means of evictions & home demolitions, brutal military occupation, denial of civil & human rights, & legislation of a series of racist laws culminating in the Nation-State Bill, defining the State as ‘the Nation State of the Jewish People’, & them only. (cont’d)
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“All the above effectively form an Apartheid regime creating Bantustan-like & Ghetto-like areas for Palestinian native communities. We believe that Zionism is an unethical principle of governance that inherently leads to a racist Apartheid regime that has been committing war crimes & denying basic human rights for Palestinians for over seven decades. Such crimes & violations include: the destruction of hundreds of towns & villages & depopulating them of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948, alongside the active prevention of return of refugees; the systematic expropriation of Palestinians’ lands & transferring them to Jewish ownership under the auspices of the state; the occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, & the Golan Heights & the application of a colonizing military regime, ruling over millions of Palestinians; the gradual annexation of the territories occupied in 1967 by violently engineering demographics; the ongoing siege on the Gaza strip & persistent massacres of the Gazan population by the Israeli Air Force; political persecution of Palestinians throughout Palestine & the ongoing incitement against the political leadership & society at large; All of these atrocities take place due to the impunity Israel receives from the international community and especially the United States.”
“In recent weeks, the Israeli government has up-scaled its attempts to seize Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem (especially in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood) and house Jewish settlers in them with the aim of completing the Judaization of the city that began in 1967. During the month of Ramadan, Israeli forces intensified their violent onslaught on the Al Aqsa Mosque compound while giving settlers the green light to vandalize and physically harm Palestinians in the West Bank, Jerusalem and throughout the ’48 territories. Mobs of settlers are acting under the auspices, and in coordination with the Israeli police. Israeli media is taking part in the unhinged incitement against Arab citizens of Israel. As a result, the Jewish mobs receive impunity for their violence, while hundreds of Palestinian citizens of Israel are arrested for protecting their homes and communities, or simply for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
To erase a people it is needed to not only disregard, dismiss and destroy the living, but to remove their dead. With that the enterprise is complete.