Israel uses bodies of killed Palestinians for bargaining: Report

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Monday 02 Nov 2015 - 19:41 Makkah mean time-20-1-1437 (AFP Image) Jerusalem, (IINA) - Israeli Defense Minister said on Sunday that Israel will not return the bodies of Palestinians killed during the month-old intifada unless the Palestinian side agrees to keep their funerals “modest”, Arabnews reported. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, at least 74 Palestinians, 15 of whom children, were killed by Israeli gunfire since October 1. Israel, which in the past has kept the bodies of slain Palestinians as a punitive measure or to trade for the remains of its soldiers, has only returned eight corpses of alleged Palestinian assailants for burial since last week. Palestinian monitors say that Israel is still holding 21 bodies. The Israeli handovers have raised hackles among some rightists in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition and were acknowledged as a reversal of policy on Sunday by Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon. Briefing reporters, Yaalon said the security cabinet had initially intended to withhold the bodies but reassessed that because of the resentment it stirred among Palestinians, many of whom question whether those killed had posed a lethal threat to Israelis. He said: “Where there is a commitment to quiet, modest funerals, we will continue to return (bodies). Where there is not, we will not return them, even if that means us burying them here”. Abbas’s administration, whose ties with the Netanyahu government have been strained by the deadlock in peacemaking since 2014 but which still quietly coordinates security with Israel, denied agreeing to the burial terms laid out by Yaalon. “They proposed this to us, and we totally rejected it, informing the Israeli side that it was the right of the Palestinian people to dignify their martyrs as they wish”, Civil Affairs Minister Hussein Al-Sheikh told Reuters. “They (alleged assailants) were killed by Israeli aggression. Most were killed for allegedly holding knives though investigations showed the opposite”, he said. The spate of Palestinian-Israeli violence is the worst since the 2014 Gaza war, and it emerged as part of religious and political tensions over the Israeli repeated assault on Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound, particularly Israel's enforcement of a temporal division of the compound between Muslims and Jews. AG/IINA