The Hamas terrorist organization in Gaza planned to exhume the bodies of British soldiers buried in a cemetery in the central part of the enclave during World Wars I and II and hold their remains hostage, according to a report published Friday by The Telegraph.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) led by the UK Defence Secretary preserves the graves of 3,217 Commonwealth veterans from World War I and II in a cemetery in Gaza City, according to The Jewish Chronicle.
Israeli forces discovered the plot when they came upon a seven-page document dated October 2022, detailing the plans while searching an underground Hamas command and control complex earlier this year.
The Israel Defense Forces said the plan was hatched by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and his Number 2, Al Qassam military wing commander Mohammed Deif. Sinwar has been hiding in a tunnel deep beneath Gaza since launching the war against Israel on October 7, 2023. Deif was eliminated by Israel in an airstrike last month.
The two Hamas leaders apparently came up with the idea as a way to prevent then-British Prime Minister Liz Truss from her intended plan to move England’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
“If the British government does not meet the aforementioned demands, the Gaza Municipality will act to remove all the corpses from the cemeteries and collect them in a special location by judicial order, declaring that the corpses are considered captive until a solution or deal is found,” read part of Hamas’ plan, which was shared with The Telegraph.
“The British government will find itself in an embarrassing position in front of the British people, its political elite and its military if any country desecrates the corpses of its soldiers,” the document said.
Although it is no longer well-known, more than 3,000 British soldiers — Christian and Jewish — were laid to rest in the Gaza cemetery, including many who died while fighting Britain’s war with the Ottoman Turks in 1917 that eventually paved the way to the British Mandatory Government in the region then known as “Palestine.”
In addition to blackmailing the British government over the location of its embassy in Israel, Hamas also reportedly intended to demand the UK either relocate its citizens’ bodies or pay “lease fees” for their graves, retroactive to 1917.
“The tactic depicted in this document is intended to quite literally terrorize the people of the UK as a whole in order to influence political decisions,” an Israeli official warned The Telegraph. “There is no way to rule out that Hamas will use this strategy or other similar ones to influence external affairs or anything within their agenda in the future.”
