According to a report by Al Jazeera on May 9, 2026, Israeli settlers allegedly forced a Palestinian family in the occupied West Bank to remove their father’s body from a village cemetery and rebury him elsewhere in an incident near Jenin.
Hussein Asasa, 80, died on Friday from natural causes and was buried later that evening in the cemetery of his village after the family received the necessary approvals from the Israeli military, relatives said. Shortly after the burial, however, villagers informed the family that Israeli settlers had arrived at the gravesite and were demanding that the grave be removed.
“They said the land was for settlement and that burial was not allowed. We told them that this is the village’s cemetery, not part of the settlement,” Asasa’s son, Mohammed, told the Reuters news agency.
According to the family, the confrontation intensified when the settlers threatened to destroy the grave using heavy machinery if the body was not removed. Concerned that the grave would be desecrated, relatives said they decided to exhume the body themselves to avoid further damage.
“We found that they already dug the grave and reached the body,” Asasa said. “We continued digging and got the body and buried him in another cemetery.”
The incident has drawn attention to ongoing tensions in the occupied West Bank, where disputes involving land, settlements and Palestinian communities continue to fuel confrontations. Families in several areas have reported increasing pressure linked to settlement expansion and access to land.
The Asasa family said the ordeal turned what should have been a peaceful burial into a traumatic experience, forcing them to relocate Hussein Asasa’s remains to another cemetery under distressing circumstances……See More
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