The Palestinian Authority leadership is planning to honor the remains of
Palestinian suicide bombers and other terrorists with full military funerals in
Ramallah.
The IDF will deliver the bodies to representatives of the PA on
Thursday, Prisoners Affairs Minister Issa Qaraqi said.
He said that the
PA would hold a “national rally” in the Mukata presidential compound in Ramallah
in honor of the “martyrs.” Attending the rally will be PA President Mahmoud
Abbas, PLO leaders, and families of the Palestinians who perpetrated suicide
bombings and other attacks over the past three decades.
Qaraqi said that
after the ceremony, the bodies would be sent to their hometowns, where each one
would be buried in a military funeral. He said that 17 bodies whose hometowns
were unknown would be buried in a Ramallah cemetery, also with full military
honors.
Another 12 bodies will be transferred for burial in the Gaza
Strip, the minister said.
Qaraqi called on Palestinians to consider
Thursday a day of celebration for the return of the “martyrs” to their
families.
Israel’s repatriation of the bodies is part of a goodwill
gesture to Abbas.
The list of names includes several suicide bombers who
carried out the attacks on the No. 2 bus in Jerusalem’s Shmuel Hanavi
neighborhood in August 2003 and at Cafe Hillel in the city’s German Colony
neighborhood the next month.
Israel will also hand over the remains of
Hassan Sarahneh, who blew himself up at a hitchhiking post in Ashkelon in 1996,
killing a female soldier, and the remains of Nasim Ja’bari and Ahmed Qawassmeh,
the two suicide bombers who killed 16 people on two buses in Beersheba in
2004.
The list also includes Abdullah Badran, a suicide bomber who killed
four Israelis at Tel Aviv’s Stage nightclub in 2005; Hiba Daraghmeh, the woman
who blew herself up at a mall in Afula in 2003, killing three people; Hassan Abu
Said, the Islamic Jihad terrorist who blew himself up at an open-air market in
Hadera in 2005, killing five people; and Labib Azzam, who in 1995 murdered five
Israelis and wounded 23 others in Ramat Gan.
In addition, Israel will
hand over the remains of the terrorists who carried out the Savoy Hotel attack
in Tel Aviv in 1975, killing eight hostages.