Key Developments (Dec 19 – Dec 26)
- Four Palestinians killed by Israeli forces, including one Palestinian with Israeli citizenship.
- Palestinian senior leader and political detainee Nasser Abu Humeid dies of cancer after Israeli prison authorities denied him treatment.
- Political detainee Dina Jaradat, who suffers from a brain illness, is released on December 23, after four months of imprisonment and denial of treatment.
- Families of Palestinians whose bodies are withheld by Israel continue protests demanding the return of the bodies of their loved ones.
In-Depth
The Israeli colonial regime dominates every aspect of Palestinians’ lives — and in many cases, even after they die. Those who dare to resist are arrested, tortured, or summarily executed, and the indignities they suffer in life extend into their death, manifested in one of Israel’s most morbid colonial practices: withholding the bodies of the slain.
Israel has effectively confiscated 115 Palestinian bodies since 2015, while another 265 bodies continue to be indefinitely interred in army-patrolled gravesites known colloquially by Palestinians as “the cemeteries of numbers” — each grave marked by a number known only to the Israeli army. The cemetery of numbers is Israel’s last and most desperate attempt at imposing colonial control on Palestinians, both living and dead.
Last week, two more Palestinians were added to the cemetery.
In Kufr Qasem, a town inside the Green Line populated by communities of Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship, Israeli police shot and killed Naim Badeer after an alleged dual stabbing and car ramming attempt. Footage released by the Israeli police shows that the 23-year-old was not shooting at the police when he was killed. Badeer’s body was confiscated, denying his family the right to bury him.
In Israeli prisons, one of the founders of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades during the Second Intifada, Nasser Abu Hmeid, died after a protracted battle with cancer while serving multiple life sentences in Israeli prison. Israel has been accused of medical negligence in the case of Abu Hmeid, which ultimately led to his death. Israel has refused to return his body to his family for burial.
Abu Hmeid wasn’t the first Palestinian who continued to be incarcerated even after his life was ended. Palestinian researcher and Ph.D. candidate Randa Wahbeh reminds us of the cases of Aziz Ewesat in 2018, and Fares Baroud in 1991, both of whom were serving life sentences when they died of medical negligence and were never returned to their families after death.
Wahbeh explains the perverse logic of this colonial policy on the Al Shabaka podcast:
“The basis of this policy is rooted in emergency regulations that are adopted from the British, but in recent years with the resurgence of this [policy], the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that bodies of Palestinians can be withheld and not returned to their families for burial because even though it may be in contravention of the sanctity of the dead, the security of the state is more important and the bodies can be used as bargaining chips for future prisoner exchanges. So basically what we see is that Palestinian bodies are being held as ransom by the Israeli state in order to make political gains.”
This is a continuation of Zionism’s existential war with the Palestine people, nothing more than the expression of the impetus to control Palestinian life and death in lieu of expulsion and ethnic cleansing.
But more than that, it is the logical extension of Israel’s settler-colonial ethos, which treats Palestinian life as dispensable and exchangeable, and Palestinian death as an opportunity to be exploited.
Under this brand of settler-colonialism, the colonizer will demand nothing less than the elimination of the native.
Important figures
- 230 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers in 2022 across Palestine.
- 171 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem alone.
- 600 Palestinian political detainees suffer from illnesses that require treatment.
- 117 bodies of Palestinians killed by Israel are currently held by Israeli authorities, while 265 Palestinian bodies are interred in Israel’s “cemetery of numbers.”
Mondoweiss Highlights
For Gaza’s Christians, Christmas is marred by permits and checkpoints, by Yumna Patel
