A Palestinian family in the occupied West Bank has been forced by Israeli settlers, reportedly acting under military protection, to dig up their father's body and rebury him elsewhere — an incident the United Nations has condemned as a stark symbol of the degradation Palestinians face under occupation. Hussein Asasa, an 80-year-old man from Asasa village near Jenin — a city in the northern West Bank — died of natural causes on Friday and was buried in the local village cemetery shortly after. His son Mohammed said the burial had been coordinated in advance with Israeli security forces, with all required permits obtained.

Within hours of the burial, however, settlers arrived and ordered the family to exhume the body, claiming the cemetery land fell within the boundaries of the nearby Sa-Nur settlement. Under international law, Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are considered illegal and are not recognised as Israeli territory. The family protested, insisting the land was the village's historic cemetery. Faced with settler threats to use a bulldozer to remove the body themselves, and under pressure from Israeli soldiers present at the scene, the family had no choice but to comply. "We found that they had already dug the grave and reached the body," Mohammed Asasa said. "We continued digging and got the body and buried him in another cemetery."

The Israeli military denied issuing any reburial instructions to the family, saying soldiers were dispatched following reports of a settler confrontation and that they confiscated digging tools from the settlers to "prevent further friction." The account from the family, however, paints a picture of soldiers who facilitated rather than stopped the coercion.

The UN Human Rights Office issued a sharp rebuke. "This is appalling and emblematic of the dehumanisation of Palestinians that we see unfolding across the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It spares no one, dead or alive," said Ajith Sunghay, head of the OHCHR's Palestinian office. The incident took place on a day when settlers also attacked a child and set homes and cars ablaze in other parts of the West Bank.

The case illustrates a broader and worsening trend. Settler violence in the West Bank has surged markedly since October 2023, and in February of this year Amnesty International warned that global impunity was accelerating illegal annexation of Palestinian land. A small number of Israeli activists continue to push back: Rabbi Arik Ascherman, who heads the human rights group Torat Tzedek (Torah of Justice), has spent more than three decades documenting settler attacks and physically interposing himself between settlers and Palestinian communities. "Before, Palestinians could be beaten one day by settlers and the next by soldiers," he said. "Now it happens at the same time, more and more often." The desecration of Hussein Asasa's grave underscores why international observers increasingly describe the situation in the West Bank not as isolated incidents but as a systematic pattern of dispossession.