Occupied Bodies: Israel is withholding the bodies of war victims
Sam Gilbert
uruknet.info
 |
Official ceremony in Ramallah for the remains of Palestinians given back by Isreal, May 2012. Photo by Lazar Simeonov.
Since
1967 Israel has maintained an unofficial policy of detaining
Palestinian and Arab war victims in mass graves and cemeteries. Today at
last 348 bodies are held prisoner by the Israeli government their
families unable to retrieve their remains.
In a traditional conflict, the bodies of the deceased
would be returned to their country of origin following peace and removal
of the occupying power. Israel refuses to return the bodies to their
families, some of whom have been waiting for decades, on the basis that the conflict is temporary and withholding the remains is necessary to maintain internal security.
Yet as the occupation enters its 46th
year and with no end in sight, the Israeli government still retains
nearly 350 bodies despite numerous appeals to the Israeli court and
international condemnation of the practice. JLAC, The Jerusalem Legal
Aid and Human Rights Center, heads up the campaign to release Arab war
victims and disclose the fate of those missing. In an interview on
Thursday July 11th, at the JLAC office in Ramallah Palestine, lawyer Haytham Khatib explained the motives behind Israel withholding these bodies.
"The rational behind this policy is a security condition,
or a security pretext. Israeli considers all of them [deceased
combatants] as terrorists, not fighter and soldiers and therefore the
Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of enemy dead do not apply."
Khatib went on to say, "Israel recognizes the importance
of funeral and religious practices for Arab peoples, as well as the
importance of Martyrs in Palestinian society." Withholding the remains
enacts a "collective punishment" against the families of fighters as
well as providing a potential deterrent against future resistance.
This practice of withholding remains is consistent with
Israeli attempts throughout history to present its activities in the
occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) within the context of perpetual
war. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappe wrote in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, this
context presents actions "In such a manner, that all activities,
including atrocities are portrayed as part of a theater of war, wherein
things are judged on a moral basis in a manner very different from the
ways they would be treated in non-combatant situation." In this case
the imprisonment of the remains of dead combatants is understood as a
necessary wartime practice instead of a colony policy designed to exact a
toll on those that have resisted the occupation.
The Numbers
According to JLAC’s campaign coordinator Salem Khilleh,
the organization has documented 442 cases of deceased combatants,
including 66 that are still missing (assumed dead). 416 of the 442 cases
are Palestinian, the rest Arab combatants from neighboring countries
who died while fighting in Palestine. The majority of these victims are
PLO fighters who engaged in direct combat with Israeli forces but also
include those that died while serving prison sentences, in direct
clashes with IDF, killed or missing while crossing border and a few that
died in terrorists attacks against Israeli civilians.
The deceased are held in secret cemeteries located in
closed military zones. So far only four of these so-called "cemeteries
of numbers" have been identified, the exact number of deceased
combatants is impossible to know given that Israel has net released
information on how many bodies it retains. Salem Khilleh describes
these cemeteries: "there are no names just iron bars with numbers
corresponding to info on the deceased, the graves are small and shallow
often containing multiple bodies." Prior to 1976 deceased were buried
without any clear Israeli policy or process, the bodies left
unidentified. Many of the deceased were placed in mass graves in shallow sandy soil running the risk of exposure and animal disturbance.
JLAC Campaign
In August of 2008 JLAC began its campaign to retrieve
the bodies of the dead and disclose the fate of those missing.
According to Salem the idea for the campaign began when one of the
parents of a deceased soldier contacted JLAC. "He was 85 at the time;
his last wish was to retrieve the body of his son, " Salem recalled the
elderly man saying.
The campaigns first success came with the release of the remains of Mashour
Taleb Saleh who was killed 1976 in a PLO guerilla operation in Israel.
In 2010, after a successful petition by JLAC to the Israeli Supreme
Court, the Israeli Authority released Mashour’s remains to his family,
some 33 years after his death.
In an interview
in 2010 Mashour’s brother spoke about the Israeli policy.
"Confiscating corpses is an immoral policy, the dead are dead. This is
punishment for both the living and the deceased. It’s a policy of
revenge; there is no law that allows anyone to retain a corps as
prisoner for decades." Since 2010 JLAC has successfully secured the
release of 92 other bodies and is petitioning for the release and
disclosure of all remaining deceased combatants along with the missing.
Legality
In a report
submitted to the United Nations in 2009, JLAC exposes Israel continued
violation of international law and the "the inappropriate and
disrespectful actions practiced on human bodies. " Conventional and
customary International Humanitarian Law has determined that contesting
parties in armed conflict, whether international or domestic, must
respect the dead whether killed in the battlefield or died while in
detention. Bodies must be collected, evacuated, buried in properly
marked graves and their families must be notified. Moreover,
the return of dead bodies to the party that they belong to or upon the
request of their next of kin is an international obligation
duly recognized under international customary law and relevant treaties.
Israeli actions constitute a direct violation of
international Law and Article 17, 120, 130 of the Geneva Convention that
outline the criteria for treatment of enemy bodies.
Graves are not adequately maintained and bodies are buried
in areas at high risk of exposure. Tombs are not properly marked and
families are unaware of their location, bared from visiting their loved
ones. Furthermore as Khilleh notes that prior to the 1st
of September 1976, "None of the cases were documented, identified or
filed. Some of the bodes were used to harvest organs and as cadavers
for medical students, while the conditions of the graves have made it
impossible to identify some of the returned remains. These actions
show a severe and criminal disrespect for the bodies of the deceased."
Yet throughout the conflict Israeli has considered itself within its legal right to retain the
remains of these war victims, defining all forms of resistance to the
occupation as terrorism. The Israeli governments treatment of the
Palestinian dead is consistent with numerous policies in the West Bank
where supposed security threats supplant international law. The
expansive nature of the term security in Israeli is used to rationalize
the imprisonment of the dead and the living. According to the
Palestinian Prisoners rights association Addameer, more than 800,000
Palestinian have been incarcerated in Israeli jails since the onset of
the occupation in 1967, thousands of which held in administrative
detention without charge or trail.
Colonial Policy
The unofficial Israeli policy of withholding the bodies of
Arab and Palestinian war victims, if viewed in comparison to other
wartime conflicts, is consistent with international law. However it is
important to contextualize this violence within the reality of the
conflict itself. Israel continual retention of the Palestinian dead is
not a byproduct of war but a form collective punishment for resisting
colonialism. Israel’s policy to withhold the remains of enemy combatants
is consistent with the State’s narrative of perpetual war. This
narrative aims to present the conflict as a battle between competing
powers, not the asymmetrical struggle against the ongoing occupation and
Judaization of the oPt. The inability for Palestinian and Arab families
to burry and honor their loved ones reflects a gross violation of their
rights and an extension of Israeli control over the bodies of the
living and the deceased. For these Palestinians the occupation extends
to the grave.
Source |
No comments: