Settlers Force Palestinian Family to Exhume Father in West Bank

Palestinian relatives of Hussein Asasa were forced to exhume and rebury their 80-year-old father in the occupied West Bank after Israeli settlers interfered with his burial near Sa-Nur, a settlement area in the Jenin region. Video from the scene showed armed settlers using spades to open the grave, turning a family burial into an act of coercion and humiliation. Asasa had died of natural causes, and his family said the burial had been permitted at the cemetery.

The confrontation sharpened a central question in the West Bank: what legal protection Palestinians have when settlers intervene in private family matters. Reuters reported that settlers claimed the grave was too close to settlement land, while Israeli troops stood by as the exhumation unfolded. The family’s account, and the video evidence from the scene, raised the possibility that permission from local authorities meant little once settlers challenged the burial on the ground.

The United Nations Human Rights Office for the occupied Palestinian territory condemned the episode as a “despicable” example of the “new level of dehumanization” facing Palestinians in the West Bank. That language reflected more than outrage over one grave. It pointed to a wider system in which movement, land use and even mourning are shaped by settlement expansion and the presence of armed civilians backed by a military that did not stop the scene.

Sa-Nur itself carries the history of that expansion. The site was evacuated under Israel’s 2005 disengagement plan, then re-established on April 19, 2026, in a ceremony attended by Israeli ministers and settler leaders. Peace Now said 126 housing units in Sa-Nur were among 643 units advanced in the West Bank at a planning council meeting scheduled for April 29. In the same period, a March 17 OHCHR report said more than 36,000 Palestinians had been forcibly displaced across the West Bank over the previous 12 months amid rising violence by Israeli security forces and settlers. In Asasa’s village, the control over land reached the grave itself.