This is the same King that the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, described as being “best known” for having “been accused of racism” after – among other detestable things – his election campaign signs compared the Muslim call to prayer with a rooster’s crow and for ejecting Palestinian families from their old, beloved homes in the besieged Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood. He told Reuters that police forcibly removed Nababteh for her own safety and implied that she should be grateful for the excavations at and near the cemetery since the new park will provide Palestinians easier access to the Old City. Imprisoned Palestinians exercise little, if any, agency over their lives and futures, including, apparently, where they can and cannot be buried.īut, of course, Arieh King, deputy mayor of Jerusalem, does not see it that way. Ultimately, the state of Israel will decide the fate of Nababteh and her son’s resting place – international law, human rights codes and decency be damned. I will not allow my son’s grave to be removed.” “Even if they kill me, I will not leave here.

“I will continue to stay with my son 24 hours a day,” she said. Wielding batons, police also fired stun grenades and skunk water cannon to disperse worried Palestinians who had gathered close by. A police officer grabbed her by the neck and throat, and pushed her away. Nababteh defied police as best she could, resting her body, for a time, against the gravestone. She was brushed aside as Israeli police wrested Nababteh’s arms from her son’s large, plain tomb. All the while, bulldozers hovered nearby.Ī young Palestinian woman tried to console Nababteh and intervene. Scores of well-armed Israeli police surrounded Nababteh as she sobbed while holding tight onto her son’s gravestone, a red tin filled with dried flowers at the head of the white marker. Predictably, Nababteh’s determination to protect the sanctity of her son’s grave was met with overwhelming force. “They keep threatening to bulldoze the graves,” Nababteh said. It was, at once, an act of defiance and resistance, fuelled by a mother’s love and instinct to protect a son she lost four years ago and still mourns. One Palestinian mother was having none of it.ĭressed in black, Ola Nababteh, draped herself over her son’s grave like a human shroud. Pictures and video from the scene show digger trucks busy levelling land within the shadow of the “authorised” Muslim gravesites. “The graves of human beings cannot be violated no matter the gender, nationality or religion,” he said. Sheikh Muhammad Hussein, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, told the Reuters news agency that the park, scheduled to open in mid-2022, is a sacrilegious assault on the ancient cemetery. Israeli assurances that “authorised burial sites” – whatever that means – would not be harmed have done little to mollify Palestinian fears. That sordid violation triggered understandable panic among Palestinians that their interred loved ones would suffer the same obscene fate. This, despite the remains – reportedly of Jordanian soldiers – having already been disturbed and exposed in a section of the cemetery Israeli authorities have claimed is “unauthorised” – whatever that means. This past Sunday, an Israeli court upheld the “clearance” work. Last week, Israeli machinery began razing the ground in and adjacent to the cemetery to make way for a so-called “Biblical Trail,” a string of theme parks in the south of the Old City. The latest desecration is taking place at al-Yusufiyah cemetery, a centuries-old Muslim graveyard in occupied Jerusalem. Even in death, Palestinians, it seems, have no respite from Israeli officials intent on stripping them of their dignity and humanity.

Force unleashed shadow guard