Israel has refused a request to transfer to Palestine the graves of Palestinian leaders buried in Syria whose tombs are threatened by jihadists, AFP reported yesterday.

Ramallah sought to transfer the interred remains of notable Palestinians after Daesh started to smash gravestones in the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk on the outskirts of the Syrian capital of Damascus last Sunday.

Daesh destroyed gravestones in the cemetery last Sunday, according to the head of political affairs at the Syrian branch of the PLO, Anwar Abdel Hadi.

“Daesh smashed gravestones in the ‘Martyrs’ Cemetery’ in Yarmouk,” after declaring the dead as heretics, AFP reported him as saying.

“We presented a request to the Israelis to allow us to move the bodies of three Palestinian leaders from a cemetery in the [Yarmouk] camp close to Damascus to Palestine,” Palestinian minister Hussein Al-Sheikh told AFP.

They were informed on Monday that the request had been denied, confirming a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Among the bodies the Palestinians wanted to repatriate was that of Khalil Al-Wazir, better known as Abu Jihad, who was assassinated by Israelis in Tunisia in 1988, as well as another senior Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) figure, Sa’ad Sayil.

Daesh has a history of destroying graves and tombs, even those of Islamic prophets. In 2014, Daesh detonated explosives in the Prophet Yunus Mosque in Mosul, Iraq where the eponymous prophet is said to have been buried.