Israel returns the body of a 17-year-old withheld since March
Teams from the Palestinian civil affairs authority took the remains at a checkpoint north of Ramallah. A campaign that documents the practice counts 800 Palestinian bodies still held.
The Palestinian General Authority of Civil Affairs said on Thursday that Israel had handed back the body of Salim Sami Salim Fuqaha, a 17-year-old from the town of Sinjil northeast of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, five months after Israeli forces killed him and kept his remains.
And it said its teams took receipt of the body at the Ein Siniya military checkpoint north of Ramallah and moved it to the Palestine Medical Complex in the city for the procedures that precede burial, with the funeral to be held in Sinjil later the same day.
Fuqaha was shot dead on 17 March on the outskirts of his hometown, and a second Palestinian teenager who was with him at the time was wounded. His body was held from that day until Thursday.
The authority said it is still working to recover every Palestinian body Israel holds and is pursuing the question case by case with the parties involved. The National Campaign for the Retrieval of Palestinian Bodies puts the number still held at 800: 256 in the numbered cemeteries kept for that purpose, and 544 taken since the practice resumed in 2015. Among the cases it has documented are 99 prisoners, 83 children under the age of 18 and 10 women.
The same campaign recorded 930 sets of remains returned from Gaza as of 4 February. Some were given back before the exchange agreement, and among them, it said, were bodies removed from cemeteries and from al-Shifa Hospital, along with 66 boxes of human remains.
Israeli law permits the remains to be kept, and Israeli media reported this month that around 1,700 Palestinian bodies are being held for possible use in a future exchange, at a point when Hamas holds no Israeli captive. International humanitarian law sets the opposite requirement: that the dead be treated with dignity and buried according to the rites of their religion.
Rights organisations have asked repeatedly for all of the remains to be given back. What a family collects at a checkpoint is one case closed out of hundreds, and the authority's own description of its work — following the files up, one at a time, with the relevant parties — is an account of a process in which every return has to be won separately.