Palestine Liberation Organization Secretary-General Saeb Erekat called for international pressures in quest of releasing the withheld bodies of Palestinians who were killed by Israel. Among them is Erekat’s nephew, Ahmed Erekat who was shot dead at a checkpoint in the West Bank last Tuesday.
“For the 5th day the Israeli authorities still jail Ahmed Erakat’s body, not allowing us to bury him like what all humans do when their loved ones die. He was murdered on June 23rd. This is not who we are as human beings. This is not our values. Help us release our martyrs’ bodies,” said Erekat on his Twitter page.
The Executive Committee for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) condemned what it termed immoral Israeli withholding slain bodies of Palestinians, killed by Israel, the latest of which was the body of Ahmed Erekat, who was shot dead by Israeli troops near the West Bank southern city of Bethlehem.
In a statement, the PLO’s Executive Committee called on all relevant international organizations to pressure the Israeli government to release those corpses, from what the PLO described as the ‘Numbers Graveyard’.
Israeli checkpoints have become death traps where Palestinians are immediately sentenced to death for the slightest mistake or even on mere suspicion, according to Euro-Med Monitor. It saw that Erekat’s case is an example of a broader pattern of systematic Israeli extrajudicial killings of Palestinians in the occupied territories.
In 2016, Israel extra-judicially executed 95 Palestinian civilians including 36 children.
All killings were systematically carried out under the same pretext that the victim was engaged in an alleged stabbing or car-ramming attack against Israeli soldiers, despite the documented absence of means to carry out such attacks, the Monitor added.
