With tearful faces the family of the slain Palestinian mother Mai Afaneh received her body reopening unsealed wounds after the Israeli occupation authorities held her body hostage for fourteen months after killing her.
Mai Afaneh 28 was a resident from town of Abu Dis east of Jerusalem and a mother to a 6-year-old daughter. She was shot dead by an Israeli settler on 16 June 2021 near the Hizma checkpoint which is to the north of Occupied Jerusalem.
On Tuesday 23 August the occupation authorities finally released her corpse handing it over to her family for burial. According to her husband Husein Jafal “An Israeli settler shot her while she was on her way to Ramallah in order to present the results of testing she had undergone at Al-Makassed Hospital in Jerusalem to her doctor who was following up on her condition before having surgery to remedy the laceration of the colon.” He added “She was in the hospital two days before her death and her health was not fine as her blood count was low so she was not ready to fight or confront anyone.” He continued “If she really wanted to attack they could easily stop her. But there was no justification to kill her.” Of the slain Mai Jafal says “She always seeks learning everywhere she was preparing for her PhD in the field of mental health from a Jordanian university. She loved our only daughter Sulaf so much and they were so attached.”
Sulaf 6 doesn’t understand why her mother was killed and why the body was withheld. Her father says that she cries each time she remembers her mother: “Whenever she feels sad with me she cries hard calling for her mother.” The long months since Mai’s killing have been difficult for Jafal and Sulaf. “We both missed her so much. Since the murder of her mother Sulaf sleeps some days with my mother and other times with my mother-in-law.”
The occupation authority used postmortem detention as a mean to blackmail the families of the martyrs. In 2008 the policy was halted but they returned to the practice by a decision of the Israeli government on October 13 2015 as a sort of punishment for the Palestinians.
In September 2019 the Israeli Supreme Court issued a decision allowing the military commander to detain the bodies of murdered Palestinians and bury them temporarily for the purpose of using them during negotiations in the future.
And in December 2021 Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz approved the policy of permanently detaining the bodies of those who make stabbing or run-over operations or similar attacks regardless of the results of the operation or the faction affiliation of the martyr.
According to an official report published by the Palestinian Ministry of Information in April the Israeli occupation is holding the bodies of 105 martyrs in refrigerators along with 256 martyrs in the Cemetery of Numbers the covert Israeli cemeteries where remains of unidentified Palestinians are interred including 9 children 3 women and 8 prisoners who spent different periods in the occupation’s prisons.
The occupation refuses to give information about the locations where most of the bodies are being held and even more seriously the report details allegations about Israel’s exploitation of these bodies and the theft of their organs to use them in treating Israeli patients.
Israel’s continued detention of the bodies of the martyrs and the failure to reveal the whereabouts of the missing is a clear violation of The Hague Treaty of 1907 which relates to the laws and customs of wars and also of the First Geneva Convention (in clauses 15 and 17) which obliges the occupying country to hand over the bodies of the killed to their families and bury them while preserving their dignity according to their religious beliefs as much as possible.
For Jafal and his daughter living in the aftermath of this practice is an intolerably cruel reality. “Sulaf anticipated this moment to see her mother’s corpse for over a year but we tried not to let her touch or entirely see the corpse because it’s distorted due to the long period of withholding. I myself couldn’t bear looking at her and what hurt me the most was seeing the Israeli soldiers who were laughing while handing us Mai’s body.”
