In this West Bank village, Israel won’t let Palestinians visit their dead
Shatha Hammad reports in Mondoweiss on 12 October 2026:
Seventy meters from the cemetery of Umm Safa, north of Ramallah, Marwan Sabbah stands in grief with a single wish: to lay a headstone on the grave of his father, Nimer Sabti Arqoub, who died on February 1, 2026. Between the village’s only cemetery and its people lies the settler bypass road known as Route 450, a nearby outpost, and settlers who lie in wait for anyone who tries to reach it.
Marwan does not want his father’s grave to go unmarked. His father taught generations of students in Umm Safa, defended the village’s land, and held fast to his own plot until his last breath, plowing it, planting it, and harvesting its olives. Marwan wants people to remember his father as someone with a name, a life, and a history that mattered.
But Marwan’s story isn’t just about the need to mark his father’s grave. It is about whether the people of Umm Safa can reach the cemetery at all — to bury their dead in the only cemetery they have, or to visit the graves of their loved ones. “If someone in the village dies, there is nowhere to bury them,” Marwan Sabbah, head of the Umm Safa village council, told Mondoweiss.
Umm Safa, a small village of around 750 people and no more than 4,800 dunams (480 hectares) of land, today holds just 100 dunams (10 hectares) — the land its houses stand on. Israeli settlements have swallowed the rest.