Israel will soon begin to hand to the Palestinian Authority (PA) an additional seven bodies of East Jerusalem Palestinians killed while carrying out terror attacks in Israel. The PA agency tasked with prisoner affairs announced in Ramallah on Aug. 15 that according to an agreement reached with the families, who petitioned the Supreme Court, Israel would release the bodies for burial. The first will be the body of Muhammad Jamal al-Kalouti, from the Kafr Aqab neighborhood, who along with another Palestinian shot at a Jerusalem light-rail car on March 9, seriously wounding one Israeli. If his funeral is small — less than 25 people — and goes off without a hitch, the rest of the bodies will be handed over to their respective families for burial.
The issue of what to do with the bodies has been a sore spot since the wave of anti-Israel terror broke out in October 2015, with the Israel Police having a policy on the matter different from that of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The bodies of assailants who had been West Bank residents and were being held by the IDF were usually handed over almost immediately, sometimes contrary to the wishes of the political echelon. The IDF has argued that holding on to the bodies and preventing their burial stirs Palestinian unrest and encourages additional terror attacks to avenge what is widely perceived on Palestinian websites and social media as Israel's humiliation of the shahids (martyrs). The Israel Police, on the other hand, have held on to the bodies of East Jerusalem assailants as a punitive measure.
After Avigdor Liberman took office as minister of defense at the end of May, the IDF's policy was changed. Following shootings on June 8 in Tel Aviv in which four Israelis were killed, Liberman ordered the military to hold on to the two assailants’ bodies.
At the end of March, families of some of the deceased Palestinians had petitioned Israel’s top court, through attorney Mohammed Mahmoud, demanding that the state release the bodies of their sons so they could be buried. On July 25, the court ordered the Israel Police and the state prosecutor’s office to explain why the bodies were not being handed over for burial. Surprisingly, before the court ruled, Israel informed the Palestinian prisoners agency that the bodies would be released to the PA.
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