Protests called across the West Bank over bodies Israel withholds

Palestinian national and Islamic factions called on Sunday for broad public participation in a week of events across Palestinian cities demanding that Israel hand back the bodies of Palestinians it holds. The call came out of a meeting in Ramallah and al-Bireh, at which the factions said the continued withholding of the remains was a violation serious enough to require an international investigation and legal accountability.

The programme itself was approved a week earlier by rights organisations and political factions. Its main events are set for noon on Wednesday, 26 August, in several governorates, where organisers will press the demand that families be allowed to receive their relatives' remains, bury them and hold funeral rites. Thursday's events run under the title "In Solidarity With the Families of Martyrs Whose Bodies Are Held in Morgues and Numbered Cemeteries", and take the form of visits to those families in West Bank cities, towns and villages.

Events are expected to run simultaneously across the West Bank, and a central event is planned in the Gaza Strip on a date organisers said would be announced later. A full schedule was due to be published on Monday. Activities are being arranged in several other countries at the same time, with groups that work on Palestinian rights.

The factions attached a set of demands about the living to the ones about the dead. They asked human rights organisations and the International Committee of the Red Cross to set up working mechanisms on the conditions of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, and called for specialist medical teams to be given access to the prisons and allowed to publish what they find.

The meeting also called for an inclusive national dialogue to rebuild the political system and preserve a single national representation under the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and said settler attacks, settlement expansion and plans for forced displacement had reached the point of needing outside intervention.

Organisations taking part in the campaign put the number of Palestinians whose remains Israel holds at around 1,700. What is being asked for this week is a change of method rather than another individual handover: recovery has worked case by case, each file pursued on its own, and the demand now being put to international bodies is for a mechanism that would cover all of the remains at once.