His father had just been buried. Then West Bank settlers forced him to dig up the body

Mohammed Asasa had only just returned home after burying his 80-year-old father Hussein when several children ran into the house shouting, "the settlers are digging up the grave!"In the small village of Asasa, near Jenin in the West Bank, from which the family patriarch took his name, Hussein had been a highly regarded figure before his death last Friday from natural causes. In keeping with Islamic custom, the old man – a former livestock trader and father of 10 children – was laid to rest in a simple plot in the graveyard, on a small hill on the other side of the village from the family home.Anxious to make sure there would be no problems, Mohammed said he'd even sought the permission of a nearby Israeli military base to allow his father's funeral to proceed.Less than half an hour later, Mohammed and his brothers were back at the entrance to the site, aghast as a group of Jewish settlers - some of them armed - were hacking away at the newly laid grave with heavy hand tools.After initially trying to negotiate with the settlers, Mohammed rushed up to the grave just as they were about to break through a slab which was all that remained between them and his father's remains."They were on the point of reaching the body," said Mohammed. "I'm sure they were about to remove it, so we had to make a decision there and then."Mohammed Asasa had sought to give his father a dignified burialThe UN Human Rights Office condemned the incident as "⁠appalling and emblematic of the dehumanisation of Palestinians" in the Occupied Territories. "It spares no-one, dead or alive," said Ajith Sunghay, local head of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.Locals said the incident was indicative of tensions in the community ever since the settlement of Sa-Nur was re-established."It's terrible, they think they own the whole area, now that they've moved back in," said one guest at the mourning tent for Hussein Asasa."Just recently, some land owned by another of our relatives was invaded by the army and settlers, removing all of the olive trees for no apparent reason," another of the Asasa siblings told me as we looked over the cemetery from a safe distance.Hussein Asasa has been remembered within his communityAfter the settlers were allowed to bring their mobile homes and re-establish a settlement at Sa-Nur, which is next to an IDF military base, much of the area has been designated a "closed military area". In practice, it means that olive groves, fields with crops and even the cemetery are, in effect, now out of bounds to their owners in the village.