Israel returns dead body to Palestinian teenager’s family Israel-Palestine conflict News

The mix focuses on Israel’s policy of detaining the bodies of Palestinians who allegedly carried out the attacks.

Israeli soldiers have returned the remains of a Palestinian teenager who was killed in the occupied West Bank in October, saying the family was the body of someone else.

The macabre mix, which the military described as an “unfortunate mistake,” is likely to draw attention to Israeli policy to maintain traces of Palestinians while allegedly carrying out attacks, human rights groups say it is a collective punishment of dead families. .

Israel intended to return the bodies of two Palestinians – Israel Khazimia and Amjad Abu Sultan – for “humanitarian reasons.” At the time of the alleged attacks, Khazimi was said to have mental health problems while Abu Sultan was a minor.

But when the remains of Abu Sultan were handed over, his family informed the soldiers that it was the wrong body. The waste has not been publicly identified.

“When the corpse was returned, it was revealed that the corpse had been misidentified. This unfortunate mistake is being reviewed by the relevant authorities, ”the Israeli army said in a statement. He apologized for the mistake and said the correct remains would be returned to the family on Saturday.

The Palestinian Civil Affairs Committee, which coordinates day-to-day activities with Israel, said it was the family of Abu Sultan who noticed that the body did not belong to their son. He could not immediately put up with the family to make comments.

Abu Sultan, 14, was killed on October 14 in the occupied West Bank town of Beit Jala, near Bethlehem.

A witness said Israeli soldiers shot Abu Sultan who was lighting a Molotov cocktail any warning or alert.

“Israeli forces routinely illegally kill Palestinian children with impunity, using excessive force and without justifying forced lethal force,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, director of the International Children’s Defense for Palestine responsibility program, after Abu Sultan’s death.

Israeli police shot and killed four children of Khazimia in September when he tried to stab an officer in the Old City of Jerusalem. His remains were returned to the Salem checkpoint near the northern city of Jenin in the West Bank.

Local sources said the Israeli army banned Palestinians from gathering near the checkpoint and allowed Khazimia’s father to be there only to pick up his body, in addition to an ambulance vehicle driven solely by the driver.

Israel says a policy of holding the remains of Palestinian attackers is necessary to prevent future attacks and to exchange the remains of two Israeli soldiers on the Gaza Strip by the Palestinian group Hamas.

According to Jerusalem’s Legal Aid and Human Rights Center (JLAC), Israel retains the remains of about 80 Palestinians., In addition to the 254 bodies often buried in “cemeteries of numbers,” there are secret cemeteries marked with plaques numbered by graves.

JLAC and Adalah Law Center for Arab Minority Rights say Israel is the only country in the world to practice necroindarchy, a policy confiscation of human remains, where it is based on the rules made in 1945 (during the British Mandate) as the basis of its policy.

International law considers this practice to be a violation of human rights. According to the Geneva Conventions, the parties to an armed conflict must bury the dead in an honorable manner, “if possible, according to the rites of religion they were and to respect their graves, to be properly cared for and marked. a way to always know ”.