Hamas planned to exhume the remains of British and Commonwealth soldiers buried in 100-year-old graves in Gaza to use as leverage to blackmail the UK government, according to a Telegraph report of a document discovered in Gaza.
The seven-page document allegedly details a scheme to dig up dead British troops interred in a British war cemetery in Gaza and hold them “prisoner.”
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.
Many of the troops buried there died fighting the Ottomans for control of the Gaza Strip in 1917, a war that paved the way for the British administration in Mandatory Palestine.
The document detailing the plot was uncovered in January at a compound linked to Hamas chiefs Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif in Khan Younis, according to Israeli officials.
The officials said they understood it was written in October 2022 and believe it was hatched in response to comments made by then-prime minister Liz Truss who said she wanted to move the British Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
According to the Telegraph, Hamas’s demands for the return of the veteran remains would have included a retraction of Truss’s Jerusalem statement and retrospective payment of “lease fees” for the cemeteries’ land, dating back over one hundred years to 1917.
“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,” the document said.
“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.”
While the plans never led to action, the land with the grave sites remains under Hamas control, so the threat of blackmail still looms large, say Israeli officials.
“The tactic depicted in this document is intended to quite literally terrorise the people of the UK as a whole in order to influence political decisions,” an Israeli official told 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.”
The document was allegedly found in a plastic sleeve marked “M’Raed” with a cache related to Hamas’s discussions with Hezbollah and other terrorist originations.
“[This] is possibly referring to Raed Salim Khalek, head of the Information and OSINT (open source intelligence) department in the Hamas military intelligence directorate”, the Israeli intelligence added.
