Gaza

- "My father is still detained...there is no difference between prison and the refrigerator", words mixed with sadness and bitterness by Suhail, the son of the martyred prisoner Saadi Al-Garabli, whose body is being held by Israel, since his martyrdom inside its prisons in 2020.

Suhail Al-Garabli told Al-Jazeera Net - "The occupation arrested my father alive for more than 26 years, and was not satisfied with the pain and suffering he had suffered, as it continued to torture him even after his death, by holding his body in mortuaries, and refusing to release it for his honor and burial."

The martyr Al-Gharabli is one of 9 martyrs prisoners, among the 103 martyrs whose bodies have been held by the Israeli occupation authorities since the “popular uprising” in 2015.

The "We want our children" campaign is active in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, with the participation of political forces and community and human rights components, to pressure for the return of the bodies of the martyrs, who are being held by Israel in refrigerators, and the so-called "cemeteries of numbers".

Arrest alive and dead

Al-Gharabli (75 years) was martyred inside his prison, where he has been staying since his arrest in 1994, and Suhail says that "the occupation prevented us from visiting him in prison, and now prevents us from taking a look at him and burying him."

Sohail, 51, is one of the nine sons of the prisoner, the martyr Al-Garabli, who was serving a life sentence for the murder of an Israeli officer.

During the years of his detention, Al-Gharabli was subjected to various forms of torture, starting with his solitary confinement for about 12 continuous years, passing through the deprivation of his most basic rights to treatment, and even the denial of his family’s visit to him in prison, according to Suhail, who continues the narration of the tragedy by saying, “My father had a strong physique. Before his arrest, however, the harsh prison conditions caused him to suffer from several serious diseases, and for many years he continued to suffer from diabetes, stress and prostate cancer, until he entered a state of clinical death that ended with his martyrdom.

Al-Gharabli - who was a teacher before he turned to work in trade - has about 70 grandchildren who have never seen him, except in a few and old photos, which the family uses to introduce the grandchildren to their grandfather, whom Israel arrests "alive and dead".

Sohail said that the family sought the assistance of human rights institutions and filed a case with the Israeli courts in order to retrieve his father's body, but to no avail. "What does Israel want from the body? Or does it want him to complete his sentence of detention even after his death?"

Israel deprived the al-Gharabli family of visiting him alive and of their right to bury him after his death (Al-Jazeera)

Stealing martyrs' members

By detaining al-Gharabli’s body, Israel continued torturing him alive and dead, according to human rights institutions concerned with prisoners, who refused to include him on the lists of released prisoners in the “Wafaa al-Ahrar Deal” known as the “Shalit Deal” in 2011, even though he was the second oldest prisoner in the occupation’s prisons, He suffers from many diseases.

The head of the "International Commission to Support the Rights of the Palestinian People" (Crowd), lawyer Salah Abdel-Ati - told Al Jazeera Net - that the occupation is perpetuating its criminality against the martyr prisoners, by detaining their bodies after their martyrdom in prisons by force and disease, "so that their bodies complete the prison sentence in refrigerators or cemeteries of numbers." ".

With this policy, which it has pursued since completing its occupation of Palestine in 1967, the occupying power denies the rules of international humanitarian law, especially the Geneva Conventions, which guarantee the protection of prisoners, living and dead, and adds Abdel Atti, “Just as the prisoner’s family has the right to visit him alive inside his prison, it is their right to receive his body.” and buried him, according to their religious law.”

Israel is also afraid of discovering its crimes by stealing the organs of Palestinian martyrs, and Abd al-Ati cited Israeli and international human rights and medical reports, which he said revealed that Israel had resorted to dissecting the bodies of martyrs in its custody and stealing their organs, and this is one of the reasons for its refusal to hand over their bodies to their families.

"We want our children"

According to the Prisoner Club’s data, the oldest bodies of the martyrs of the captive movement held by the occupation state are the body of the martyr Anis Dawla from the city of Qalqilya, who has been detained since 1980, and the last of them is the body of the martyr Daoud Al-Zubaidi, who was martyred a few days ago in Jenin camp in the West Bank.

The media official in the Prisoner Club, Amani Farajneh - told Al Jazeera Net - that the occupation is holding the bodies of prisoners of the captive movement from Gaza, and they are, in addition to Al-Garabli, Sami Al-Amour, who was martyred in 2021 in the prison where he languished for 13 years, and Faris Baroud, who was martyred in 2019 in The prison in which he spent 28 years, and he is a veteran of Gaza's prisoners.

Farajneh stressed that Israel is the only country in the world that pursues a policy of detaining the bodies of the martyrs, and thus commits "crimes of collective punishment", and kills the Palestinian twice, by taking away his freedom during his life, and by depriving his relatives of honoring and burying him.

Israel deals with the file of the bodies of the Palestinian martyrs with a high mood - according to Farajneh's description - and said: "The occupation has no standards in this regard, and we do not count on the courts of the occupation robbed of will and justice, which are governed by the decisions of the Israeli political level."

According to Sarhneh, the "We want our children" campaign comes at a time when the Palestinians are increasingly afraid of an Israeli escalation in the policy of detaining the bodies of the martyrs, in light of the growing intensity of the daily confrontation currently in the occupied Palestinian territories.