EU Denounces Israeli Corpses For Being Found On Palestinian Land

Brussels, July 1 – The chief of European Union foreign policy spoke out against the remains of three Israeli teenagers today, criticizing them for being found on land the Palestinians claim.

Eyal Yifrach, 19, Gilad Shaer, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16, students at a yeshiva in the Etzion Bloc of communities south of Jerusalem, were abducted by armed Palestinians nearly three weeks ago and shot to death after Mr. Shaer called the police from his mobile phone to report they had been kidnapped. The kidnappers hurriedly disposed of the bodies in a field owned by a relative of one of them, which led Catherine Ashton to denounce the teenagers for trespassing on that field.

“It is unconscionable that after all this time, these corpses chose to be buried – however temporarily – in occupied Palestinian land, a clear violation of international law,” she told reporters. “The European Union and myriad other international bodies have made it clear that we will not stand for such cavalier trampling of Palestinian rights. We call on Israel to demonstrate restraint in its handling of this matter,” she continued, defining “restraint” as “any course of action that weakens or undermines deterrence.”

The EU, several individual countries, and various international organizations also leveled criticism at Israel for finding the bodes in a Palestinian field. “Israel must decide once and for all where it wants its corpses to be found,” said Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth. “But if Israel chooses to continue finding dead citizens or soldiers lying in fields that under the Oslo agreements are to be under Palestinian administration, it will face the consequences.”

Roth praised the work of the international community in ensuring that Israel removed the bodies from the field near the Palestinian town of Halhul and reburied them within the 1967 lines, calling the result a victory. The three were formally laid to rest in the town of Modiin this afternoon.

Objections to the presence of Israeli or Jewish corpses in areas that have been cleared of living Jews have been raised before, most prominently by Jordan, which defaced thousands of Jewish graves on Mt. Zion following the 1948 takeover of East Jerusalem by the Jordanian Arab Legion. After the Legion expelled all Jews from the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, Jordanians and Palestinians spent years upturning tombstones and using them in construction of, for example, latrines. In more recent years, far-right European activists have expressed similar objections to the presence of Jewish remains by vandalizing Jewish cemeteries across the continent.