Israeli soldiers inspecting an underground Hamas compound earlier this year allegedly uncovered the terror group’s grisly plot to exhume British and Commonwealth World War I and II soldiers buried in the Gaza Strip.
Hatched in 2022, the seven-page plan apparently called for Hamas to dig up the soldiers’ bodies and hold their remains hostage, the Telegraph reported.
The Israeli Defense Forces claims the plot was conceived as a way to keep the UK from moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move announced by then-British Prime Minister Liz Truss.
The Hamas plan, the IDF contends, was concocted by the terror group’s leader Yahya Sinwar and the its military commander, Muhammad Deif, who was killed in a July airstrike.
A little more than 3,000 Christian and Jewish British soldiers are interred in a cemetery in central Gaza.
Many of the British soldiers laid to rest there died fighting the Ottomans in 1917.
The terror group also reportedly planned on demanding UK officials relocate the soldiers’ bodies, or pay them “lease fees” retroactive 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,” read part of Hamas’ plan, which was shared with The Telegraph.
“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 plan continued.
Truss abandoned the move to Jerusalem, and the plan was apparently scrapped.
It is believed the blackmailing plot was hashed out a year before Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7.
An unnamed Israeli official was quick to note the plan could still be carried out.
“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,” the official told The Guardian.
“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 cemetery has sustained some damage in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas.
