In the small village of Asasa, near Jenin in the northern occupied West Bank, a Palestinian family was forced by armed Israeli settlers to dig up their father's freshly buried body less than an hour after his funeral, carrying his remains to a cemetery in a neighbouring village under the settlers' armed watch.

Hussein Asasa, an 80-year-old former livestock trader and father of ten, died of natural causes on Friday 8 May and was buried the same day in accordance with Islamic custom in the village graveyard — a simple plot on a hillside. His son Mohammed had taken the precaution of coordinating the funeral with a nearby Israeli military base. Within thirty minutes of returning home, however, family members were alerted that settlers from the hilltop settlement of Sa-Nur, situated directly above the cemetery, were hacking at the grave with heavy hand tools. Mobile phone footage showed the settlers, some armed with automatic rifles, warning the family: "Either you exhume the body or we'll do it." Their stated objection was that the burial plot was too close to their settlement. Faced with the threat of the body being physically removed by strangers, Mohammed and his brothers dug up their father themselves and carried his shrouded remains away down the hill.

Sa-Nur is a recently re-established settlement; it had previously been evacuated under Israeli government orders in 2005, but the Netanyahu government permitted settlers to return as part of a broader and deeply contested expansion of settlements across the West Bank. All Israeli settlements on Palestinian land are considered illegal under international law. Since Sa-Nur's reoccupation, much of the surrounding area has been declared a closed military zone, effectively restricting Palestinian access to their own farmland, olive groves, and, as this incident makes plain, their cemetery. Villagers describe settlers who are increasingly aggressive and openly armed, and say that even access painstakingly arranged with the Israeli military can be overridden by settler action.

The Israeli army said it intervened to confiscate digging tools from the settlers and to prevent further escalation, and the Israel Defense Forces issued a statement saying it "condemns any attempt to act in a manner that harms public order, the rule of law, and the dignity of the living and the deceased." The family, however, said soldiers were present and stood by as the forced exhumation took place. The UN human rights office described the incident as "appalling and emblematic of the dehumanisation of Palestinians" in the occupied territories, with the local head of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights stating that the violence "spares no-one, dead or alive." In Israel, prominent Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy challenged his readers to imagine the international reaction had Palestinians done the same to an Israeli grave.

The episode has deepened shock and grief across the occupied West Bank, where settler violence has surged sharply. Israeli human rights organisation Breaking the Silence counted 378 settler incidents in just 40 days. The phrase circulating in Palestinian communities — "even the dead are not left in peace" — captures a broader sense of vulnerability that now extends, as this family's ordeal shows, beyond the living. Hussein Asasa was eventually laid to rest in a graveyard in a neighbouring village, far from the settlement that had refused him even a burial plot.