Israeli troops operating in Gaza earlier this year reportedly discovered a Hamas plan to exhume the remains of British soldiers from World Wars I and II buried in the Strip and hold them in order to deter the United Kingdom from moving its embassy from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.
According to The Telegraph newspaper, the plot was detailed in a seven-page document discovered by Israel Defense Forces soldiers in an underground compound in Khan Younis that has been linked to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and the terror group’s slain military commander Muhammad Deif.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission administers a cemetery in central Gaza holding the graves of Christian and some Jewish soldiers from World War I. According to the Telegraph report, the graveyard holds the remains of over 3,000 Commonwealth troops, many of whom died fighting the Ottomans in 1917. It was “immaculately maintained,” the Telegraph said, until the staff was evacuated to Egypt when war erupted in Gaza following Hamas’s October 7 massacre in southern Israel.
The plan to exhume the bodies was reportedly made after then-British prime minister Liz Truss said in late 2022 that she was considering moving the UK embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.
Apart from pressuring the UK to retract that intention, the terror group had reportedly planned on demanding that London evacuate the soldiers’ remains outside of Gaza or pay “lease fees” 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,” The Telegraph quoted from the Hamas document, which it also published.
“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,” it added, noting that forcing the UK to engage with the terror group, which controlled Gaza from 2007, would also be strategically advantageous.
The British government backed down from Truss’s pledge, made shortly before she left office, saying in November 2022 that it would not relocate its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, at which point the plot was apparently dropped.
Although the plot was reportedly hatched a year before the October 7 assault on Israel that killed some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and saw 251 taken hostages, an unnamed Israeli official told the Telegraph that the extortion threat remains real.
“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,” the official said. “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.”
According to a CNN report earlier this year, the cemetery has sustained some damage in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, though it remained largely intact as of January.