Rights and Accountability 29 April 2019
“You killed him! You killed him!”
So shouts a Palestinian man after Israeli soldiers gun down Muhammad Ali Dar Adwan, 23, in Kufr Aqab, a neighborhood of East Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank.
“Help him, you killed him!” the man shouts in Hebrew seconds later.
Soldiers carry away Dar Adwan’s body. He is declared dead.
The young man’s killing early on the morning of 2 April is shown in video footage compiled by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem:
The video shows that Dar Adwan was shot while running away from soldiers.Israeli soldiers had launched a late-night raid on the neighborhood and a group of youths responded by throwing stones at them. About half an hour into the raid, according to B’Tselem, youths threw two improvised explosive devices. Soldiers fired on the youths, who ran away.
Dar Adwan ran in the opposite direction of the others, and continued running under heavy Israeli military gunfire, until he was hit as he fled.
Night raids
Night raids are a horrifying routine for many Palestinian communities in the West Bank.
Pre-dawn raids, undertaken while residents are typically asleep, are used to ensure Israel’s “subjugation of the Palestinian population and as a method of social control,” according to the human rights group Al-Haq.
Dar Adwan’s death is just one recent example of Israel’s “completely unjustified” use of lethal fire against Palestinians in the West Bank, B’Tselem states.
Like Dar Adwan, Sajid Mizher was killed during a night raid in Dheisheh refugee camp, near Bethlehem, last month. Mizher, a 17-year-old volunteer paramedic, was shot while coming to the aid of a wounded man.
Israeli forces targeted and killed Mizher, who was wearing a high-visibility vest, knowing that he was a paramedic – as they have knowingly shot and killed three paramedics during Great March of Return protests in Gaza over the past year.
Earlier this month, soldiers shot Osama Hajajeh, a 16-year-old shepherd, at close range while his hands were bound behind his back and his eyes were covered.
The high schooler had been ambushed by soldiers waiting to detain stone-throwing youths.
An Israeli army medic and a Palestinian woman treated the boy, likely saving his life, in contrast to the many Palestinians over the past few years who were shot by soldiers and left to bleed to death in the street.
Palestinians succeeded in breaking through a group of soldiers to carry the boy away and take him to a hospital.
Routine use of deadly force
Israel’s routine use of lethal force against Palestinians is not limited to the West Bank. In Gaza, more than 200 men, women and children have been killed, and another 8,200 wounded by live fire during Great March of Return protests since their launch 13 months ago.
Forty-one Palestinians have died by Israeli military fire or were shot and killed by Israeli settlers so far this year.
After Muhammad Abd al-Fattah, a 23-year-old father, was fatally shot by Israeli settlers as he lay on the ground, defenseless, earlier this month, Israeli soldiers destroyed video evidence of the incident.
Comments
Murder
Permalink Hector replied on
This is outrageous. A murder that is unlikely to see justice. We must change this.
Shoot to kill policy.
Permalink Sean Breathnach replied on
It is obvious to anyone following the Israel/Palestine conflict, that the Israeli army has a shoot to kill policy. If the IDF are not beating up Palestinians, they are killing them. The Israeli occupation is a brutal indefensible attack on Palestinians basic human rights