Skeleton found under Gaza rubble painful reminder for families of Palestinians missing since 2014
A
Palestinian boy walks past the rubble of his family's former house on
May 11, 2015, in Gaza City’s Shujayya neighborhood. (AFP/Thomas Coex,
File)
The
discovery of the two-year-old remains has brought back to the surface
difficult memories for the families of Palestinians who were declared
missing during the war, which left more than 2,000 Palestinians dead,
including at least 1,462 civilians according to the UN.
Human
rights groups reported that numerous Palestinians went missing during
the 51-day military offensive. Some were later found, either alive or
dead, although the fate of many others remains unknown.
Among
those still missing two years later is Noor Omran, who disappeared after
Israeli ground troops invaded the town of al-Qarara in the Khan Yunis
district in the southern Gaza Strip.
On the night of July 23,
2014, then 16-year-old Noor got on his motorcycle to go to the family’s
poultry farm, unaware that Israeli troops had just invaded and taken
over that area, his brother Muatasim recalls.
Noor did not come back that night, and his family hasn’t heard from him since.
His
family searched the farm he was supposed to visit over and over, with
the hopes of finding a body or remains, but every search left the
grieving family empty-handed. All that remained was his motorcycle,
untouched, with no signs of gunshots or blood.
“He seems to
have left the motorcycle and taken the keys with him. This motorcycle
remains a witness to the last place he was before he disappeared,”
Muatasim says.
According to Muatasim, the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has tried to help the family find
Noor, by taking DNA samples from the family and submitting them to
Israeli authorities to see if they were holding him prisoner or
withholding his body -- to no avail.
“It’s likely that the
issue of missing persons, including my brother, is tied to the issue of
Israeli soldiers held in Gaza,” Muatasim says, referring to the Israeli
soldiers who disappeared during the 2014 war, and have been held as a bargaining chip between Hamas and the Israeli government.
The
two Israeli soldiers at the center of prisoner negotiations, Hadar
Goldin and Oron Shaul, were pronounced dead during the 2014 war, as
Hamas later claimed to be holding their bodies.The two soldiers’
families in November demonstrated to pressure the Israeli government to
halt the return of all Palestinian bodies -- including those of Palestinians from occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank killed since October -- until Hamas turned over the soldiers’ bodies.
The
Omran family says it has been suffering since Noor's disappearance, and
that it would be "a thousand times easier" to have learned that the
teenager had died a “martyr” than to remain in the dark about his fate
for two years.
“It’s a disaster," Muatasim says. "Our family is swinging between having hope and losing hope."
Muatasim Omran shows a picture of his brother Noor. (MaanImages)
In
April 2015, the Israeli government announced that it held the bodies of
19 Palestinians killed during the 2014 war, but neither Israeli nor
Palestinian authorities gave the names of the slain Palestinians,
according to Muatasim.
Prisoners affairs expert Abd al-Nasser
Farawaneh tells Ma’an that the case of missing Palestinians remained
unaddressed because of both Israeli and Palestinian leadership.
Farawaneh
says many families of the missing have not reached out to the ICRC or
other human rights organizations for help, out of fear that Israel might
retaliate against them for their missing relative's participation in
resistance against Israeli forces.
Lawyer Yahya
Muharib of the al-Mezan Center for Human Rights says that the Israeli
military prosecution has never cooperated in the cases they brought
forward, hindering any progress for the distressed families.
Despite
the overall difficulty of the process, Muharib says that the al-Mezan
Center managed to obtain information from Israeli sources about some of
the Palestinians who went missing during the 2014 war, and were able to
declare them as being alive and in Israeli custody.
However,
after six cases were dealt with in coordination with Israeli military
prosecution, Muharib claims Israeli authorities stopped cooperating,
even after al-Mezan submitted requested ‘power of attorney’ documents..
Such was the fate of Noor Omran's case.
Echoing
Muatasim’s suspicions, Farawneh says that Israel does not want to give
the names of dead Palestinian bodies it holds in order to use them as
bargaining chips in the eventuality of a deal to exchange them with the
bodies of Israeli soldiers held in Gaza.
“Israel hasn’t
announced the names or details in attempt to put pressure on Hamas and
to use it as a bargaining chip for negotiations,” the lawyer affirms
On
the Palestinian side, things have also been left ambiguous by Hamas
leadership, which has not released numbers or details regarding missing
Gazans.
Farawaneh attributes the lack of clarity from
Palestinian leadership to “security reasons,” saying Hamas can’t
announce the names of missing people since it remains unaware of who is
among the 19 bodies held by Israel, and whose bodies possibly remain
trapped under rubble two years on.
The missing people, he
says, “could be alive and held in Israeli prisons, but the Palestinian
side doesn’t want to reveal their identities,” to avoid misleading their
families into thinking they are dead.
While both
Israel and Hamas continue to use the bodies in their possession as
bargaining chips, the families of the missing Palestinians, like Noor
Omran’s relatives, remain “swinging” between hope and the torturous wait
for a resolution.
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