FOR nearly two weeks, 11 bodies lay in the morgues of Jenin as Israeli raids ravaged the city and its refugee camp.
Their families were too frightened to bury them in Jenin because of Israeli snipers, drones and artillery.
“Families are afraid to bury their loved ones in the camp cemetery because Israeli snipers are stationed on high buildings,” Mahmoud al-Saadi, director of emergency services in Jenin, said on Monday. “Some bodies have been in the morgue for over 13 days. We need Israeli clearance just to conduct a burial, and even that has been delayed multiple times.”
In the time since Israel launched its latest raid on Jenin on January 21, many people have died. At least 30 have been killed by Israeli soldiers while others have died of natural causes.
They lingered, unburied, as their families struggled to lay them to rest.
For 55-year-old Bassam Turkman, who lives in the refugee camp, the sudden death of his 60-year-old brother, Osama, was an “insurmountable loss” deepened by the torment of being unable to give him a proper burial.
Driven from their home, the Turkman family sought refuge in Burqin, a town west of Jenin. But their fragile sense of stability collapsed once again with the eldest brother’s sudden deterioration and death.
For days, Osama’s body lay in the cold limbo of a hospital morgue as the family pondered whether to bury him in Burqin’s unfamiliar soil or cling to the faint chance of returning him to the cemetery in the camp to rest beside the home they were forced to flee.
Bassam pleaded with his family to choose Burqin.
“We grew up believing that honouring the dead meant burying them quickly,” he told Al Jazeera. “Leaving him in the morgue indefinitely just didn’t feel right, especially since the hospital was already overwhelmed with the bodies of those killed during the operation.”
The raid on Jenin comes during a spike in Israeli violence in the West Bank since a fragile ceasefire halted Israel’s 15-month assault on Gaza, which has killed close to 62,000 Palestinians and left the enclave in ruins.
The operation has driven nearly all of Jenin refugee camp’s 20,000 people from their homes, according to the United Nations.
“We are a people who need to visit our dead, to sit by their graves, talk to them and remember,” Bassam said. “Burying our loved ones far from home is a pain in itself.”