The Israeli Knesset on Monday evening approved by the first reading a bill that allows the Israeli occupation authorities to detain the bodies of Palestinian martyrs and ban funerals.
Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper on Tuesday reported that 57 MKs voted in favor of the bill 11 voted against while the rest abstained.
The bill grants the Israeli police the authority to detain the bodies of martyrs and set some conditions for their release regarding the timing the funeral procession and the place and way of burial.
Initiated by Israel’s Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan and Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked the bill provides for holding the bodies of Palestinian martyrs under the pretext of fearing that their funerals might be turned into acts of “violence and incitement”.
Based on the bill the Israeli Supreme Court does not have the right to object to police orders to detain bodies of Palestinian martyrs.
The bill which was approved by the preliminary reading on 25th January 2016 still needs to be ratified by the second and third readings to become in force.
The bill was first proposed following a Supreme Court decision to hand over the bodies of the Palestinians who carried out the al-Aqsa shooting attack in July 2017 in which two Israeli policemen were killed. The Israeli police then refused to return the bodies of the three martyrs.
Nearly 253 bodies of Palestinian martyrs have been detained by the Israeli authorities over years. Some bodies were transferred to the “cemeteries of numbers” after being held in mortuaries.
The Israeli authorities aim through this policy to pressure the Palestinian resistance and force it to hand over Israeli soldiers captured in the Gaza Strip.
