The Israeli-Palestinian violence landscape in the West Bank included a separate fatal shooting of a Palestinian man near a U.N.-run school for refugees on Monday, according to police and Palestinian health officials.
A Palestinian family in the northern West Bank described how Israeli settlers forced them to exhume the body of a newly buried relative after a burial they said had been coordinated with the Israeli military. Mohammed Asasa said his family had planned the funeral for his 80-year-old father, Hussein, in a cemetery belonging to the village of Asasa, where the family said generations have been buried in marked graves.
Asasa said the incident began after the family finished the burial and was receiving condolences at home. He said armed men from the nearby Sa-Nur settlement arrived and ordered the family to dig up the body, claiming the land belonged to Sa-Nur, less than half a kilometer away.
Asasa said he learned of the digging while villagers came running back to his home shortly after the funeral. He said he then went to the cemetery and found it filled with settlers, with Israeli troops surrounding the area.
Asasa said villagers decided to exhume the remains themselves after settlers threatened to dig up the grave with a bulldozer. He said video from the episode showed villagers carrying the body from the cemetery while Israeli military escorts moved alongside the group, with additional men who appeared to be settlers further uphill.
“This had never happened before,” Asasa said. “You have no other choice.”
The Israeli military said its forces responded to reports of clashes at the site and confiscated settlers’ digging tools. The military said it did not force the family to move the remains, and that it protected them as they relocated the body to a nearby cemetery; it did not say whether anyone was arrested.
The case unfolded against what the family and Palestinians described as a broader pattern of settler influence and persistent violence during the past four years of Israel’s current government. Israel evacuated Sa-Nur in 2005, but settlers opposed to the withdrawal have sought to reestablish it as an outpost; Israel reauthorized it in 2025 and reestablished it last month, with a ribbon-cutting attended by multiple government ministers, the report said. The Palestinians and most of the international community consider all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank illegal, a characterization Israel disputes.
Asasa said the sequence of events left him uncertain about what funerals would look like in the future. “Are we going to go around the neighboring villages asking for a place to bury them?” he asked.
Separately, Israeli police said a Palestinian man was shot and killed on Monday by Israeli forces near a school for refugees on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Police said the man was armed with a rifle and was shot after exiting his car with the weapon.
The Ramallah-based Palestinian Health Ministry identified the man as Ayman Al-Hashlamoun, 30, from Kufr Aqab on Jerusalem’s northern outskirts, and said his body remained in Israeli custody. The shooting occurred outside a school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Kufr Aqab, near the Qalandia refugee camp.
The report said the incident occurred amid broader violence in the occupied West Bank as Israel authorizes new settlements and revises administrative measures governing areas under its control. It also said that, as of May 3, at least 45 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces or settlers, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.