Hamas docs reveal plan to dig up remains of British and Commonwealth troops

AP Photo/Adel Hana

Hamas had plans to dig up the remains of British and Commonwealth troops buried in Gaza, documents state.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), chaired by the U.K. defence secretary, has maintained a cemetery in central Gaza that holds the remains of more than 3,000 Commonwealth troops from the world wars.

Those soldiers mostly died fighting the Ottomans for control of the Gaza Strip in 1917. The conflict would lead to Britain’s administration of Palestine. Britain would eventually play a massive role in the creation of Israel.

The plan to exhume the remains of the soldiers and hold them “prisoner” is detailed in a seven-page document, shared with The Telegraph by Israeli officials.

Israeli officials believe the document was written on or around October 5, 2022 by an unknown official in response to comments made by then-prime minister Liz Truss calling for the British embassy in Israel to be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The document called for at least one of the following demands: a retraction of the Jerusalem statement, evacuation of the soldier’s remains to cemeteries outside Gaza or the retrospective payment of land “lease fees” for the cemeteries dating back 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,” says the document. “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 predates the current conflict, though an Israeli official told The Telegraph that extortion remains a threat.

“The tactic depicted in this document is intended to quite literally terrorize the people of the U.K. as a whole in order to influence political decisions. 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.”