Ceremony planned for return of bodies

A ceremony will be held Thursday at the presidential headquarters in Ramallah to mark the repatriation of the bodies of 91 Palestinians, the minister of detainee affairs said. Israel announced May 14 it would return 100 bodies interred in numbered graves as a "gesture" to President Mahmoud Abbas. Issa Qaraqe said 91 bodies will arrive at the compound at 3 p.m. Thursday, where a military honor ceremony will be held for the deceased, their families, attended by the president and PLO officials. The remains will then be transferred to families, including 12 bodies which will be sent to families in the Gaza Strip. Seventeen bodies will be buried in a mass grave in Ramallah because their families could not be identified, Qaraqe said. The family of Nasser al-Buz, who is on the list of Palestinians to be returned, told Ma'an they would demand a DNA test to verify his identity. Al-Buz, who founded the Black Panther military wing of Fatah, disappeared near the Jordanian order in 1989. Wanted for years, he was on his way to Jordan, his brother Ahmad told Ma'an. Ahmad said his family would not bury Nassar without proof of his identity, adding that they had not heard any news of his brother since he disappeared. "After all these years of waiting, it's our right to make sure that what we bury is really our brother," he said. Since the 1960s, Israel has withheld the bodies of hundreds of Palestinians, interred in numbered, rather than named, graves in a cemetery in the Jordan Valley.