Israeli lawmakers have passed a controversial bill allowing police to hold the corpses of alleged Palestinian assailants indefinitely, parliament said on Thursday.
The act was passed late Wednesday by 48 votes to 10, a Knesset statement said, hours after another measure permitting the interior minister to strip Palestinians in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem of their permanent residency permits “if they are involved in terrorism.”
The government announced in 2016 that it would not release for burial the bodies of Palestinian assailants killed during attacks unless Palestinians in Gaza released the remains of two Israeli soldiers believed to have been killed in a 2014 war in Gaza.
In November 2017, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signalled that Israel would not repatriate the bodies of five Islamic Jihad militants killed when the army blew up a tunnel stretching from the Gaza Strip into its territory.
The Israeli Supreme Court ruled in December that the policy was illegal under current law, but it gave the government six months to enact new legislation.
The revised act gives authority to police district commanders “to set conditions for returning the body of a militant for family burial,” the Knesset statement said.
