His father had just been buried. Then West Bank settlers forced him to dig up the body

Mohammed Asasa had only just returned home after burying his 80-year-old father Hussein when several children ran into the house shouting, "the settlers are digging up the grave!"

In the small village of Asasa, near Jenin in the West Bank, from which the family patriarch took his name, Hussein had been a highly regarded figure before his death last Friday from natural causes.

In keeping with Islamic custom, the old man – a former livestock trader and father of 10 children – was laid to rest in a simple plot in the graveyard, on a small hill on the other side of the village from the family home.

Anxious to make sure there would be no problems, Mohammed said he'd even sought the permission of a nearby Israeli military base to allow his father's funeral to proceed.

Less than half an hour later, Mohammed and his brothers were back at the entrance to the site, aghast as a group of Jewish settlers - some of them armed - were hacking away at the newly laid grave with heavy hand tools.

After initially trying to negotiate with the settlers, Mohammed rushed up to the grave just as they were about to break through a slab which was all that remained between them and his father's remains.

"They were on the point of reaching the body," said Mohammed. "I'm sure they were about to remove it, so we had to make a decision there and then."

The settlers were from a recently reestablished settlement called Sa-Nur, situated on top of the hill above the cemetery.

Although all settlements on Palestinian land are widely regarded as illegal under international law, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu recently allowed Sa-Nur to be re-occupied, as part of its highly controversial decision to expand and create new settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

Mobile phone footage shows family members having to then dig up the grave themselves after settlers - armed with automatic rifles - warned them: "Either you exhume the body or we'll do it." They claimed the burial site was too close to their settlement.

More images showed how Mohammed and his brothers then carried the shrouded body of their late father away from the cemetery and down the hill to relative safety under the watchful gaze of the settlers.

The Israeli army later said it had intervened to confiscate digging tools from the settlers and to avoid further tension.

But the family accused soldiers of standing by as they were forced by the settlers to unceremoniously and humiliatingly empty the newly laid grave.

In a statement to the BBC, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it "condemns any attempt to act in a manner that harms public order, the rule of law, and the dignity of the living and the deceased".

The UN human rights office condemned the incident as "⁠appalling and emblematic of the dehumanisation of Palestinians" in the Occupied Territories.