Mohammed Asasa had only just returned home after burying his 80-year-old father Hussein when several children ran into the house shouting, “the settlers are digging up the grave!”
In the small village of Asasa, near Jenin in the West Bank, from which the family patriarch took his name, Hussein had been a highly regarded figure before his death last Friday from natural causes.
In keeping with Islamic custom, the old man – a former livestock trader and father of 10 children – was laid to rest in a simple plot in the graveyard, on a small hill on the other side of the village from the family home.
Anxious to make sure there would be no problems, Mohammed said he’d even sought the permission of a nearby Israeli military base to allow his father’s funeral to proceed.
After initially trying to negotiate with the settlers, Mohammed rushed up to the grave just as they were about to break through a slab which was all that remained between them and his father’s remains.
“They were on the point of reaching the body,” said Mohammed. “I’m sure they were about to remove it, so we had to make a decision there and then.”
The settlers were from a recently reestablished settlement called Sa-Nur, situated on top of the hill above the cemetery.
Although all settlements on Palestinian land are illegal under international law, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu recently allowed Sa-Nur to be re-occupied, as part of its highly controversial decision to expand and create new settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.
Mobile phone footage shows family members having to then dig up the grave themselves after settlers – armed with automatic rifles – warned them: “Either you exhume the body or we’ll do it.” They claimed the burial site was too close to their settlement.
More images showed how Mohammed and his brothers then carried the shrouded body of their late father away from the cemetery and down the hill to relative safety under the watchful gaze of the settlers.
The Israeli army later said it had intervened to confiscate digging tools from the settlers and to avoid further tension.
But the family accused soldiers of standing by as they were forced by the settlers to unceremoniously and humiliatingly empty the newly laid grave.
In a statement to the BBC, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it “condemns any attempt to act in a manner that harms public order, the rule of law, and the dignity of the living and the deceased”.
‘It spares no-one’
The UN human rights office condemned the incident as “appalling and emblematic of the dehumanisation of Palestinians” in the Occupied Territories.
“It spares no-one, dead or alive,” said Ajith Sunghay, local head of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Locals said the incident was indicative of tensions in the community ever since the settlement of Sa-Nur was re-established.
“It’s terrible, they think they own the whole area, now that they’ve moved back in,” said one guest at the mourning tent for Hussein Asasa.
“Just recently, some land owned by another of our relatives was invaded by the army and settlers, removing all of the olive trees for no apparent reason,” another of the Asasa siblings told me as we looked over the cemetery from a safe distance.
After the settlers were allowed to bring their mobile homes and re-establish a settlement at Sa-Nur, which is next to an IDF military base, much of the area has been designated a “closed military area”.
In practice, it means that olive groves, fields with crops and even the cemetery are, in effect, now out of bounds to their owners in the village.
Villagers say that even if access is painstakingly co-ordinated with the IDF, the settlers are far more aggressive and threatening – many now openly carrying guns.
There has been a recent surge in settler-related violence across the West Bank, with much of the world distracted by war and conflicts elsewhere.
The New York Times recently reported that between the start of the US-Israeli war against Iran and the end of April, 13 Palestinians had been killed in settler attacks, hundreds injured and many more driven from their homes.
Empowered by support from extremist ministers in the Netanyahu government and willing to use their weapons, settlers are an increasing threat to the safety and livelihoods of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, human rights groups say.
Hussein Asasa was eventually laid to rest by his sons in a small graveyard in a neighbouring village, finally free from the torment and tension faced by an increasing number of people who call this land “home”.
