Izz al-Din Tamimi received threats before Israel killed him

Tamara Nassar Rights and Accountability 7 June 2018

This article has been updated since first publication to correct how Izz al-Din Abdel Hafith Tamimi was shot.

Israeli occupation forces fatally shot 21-year-old Izz al-Din Abdel Hafith Tamimi in the occupied West Bank village of Nabi Saleh on Wednesday, in what human rights defenders are calling an “extrajudicial killing.”

His death followed threats from Israel’s internal intelligence agency that he could face assassination, his family said.

Izz al-Din was shot in the back while he was running away after throwing a stone at an Israeli soldier, according to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

He was left to bleed for half an hour before he was transferred to an Israeli military vehicle, where he was held for another quarter hour before receiving any medical attention, according to prisoners rights group Addameer.

Denying medical treatment to injured Palestinians is a common practice of Israeli occupation forces that has often led to their deaths – and is a war crime if done intentionally.

“We tried to reach the martyr to provide aid,” Muhammad Tamimi, a relative who witnessed the killing, told Quds News Network, “but as soon as we reached him, we were attacked and prevented by Israeli forces.”

“What happened to our son is liquidation in every sense of the word. We witnessed the criminal will of occupation soldiers to deliberately kill him,” his family told Wattan TV.

Local media posted photos and videos of family members and villagers mourning his killing:

A video posted by Quds News Network shows the aftermath of the killing, including a soldier handling Izz al-Din’s body, and bloodstained ground:
Addameer stated that the “extrajudicial killing of Izz al-Din represents the occupation forces’ continued disregard for the right to life of the Palestinian population.”

Threatened

Izz al-Din Tamimi was arrested multiple times since he was 14 and his home has been invaded repeatedly.

Israeli occupation forces were pursuing him for a year and entered the village earlier on Wednesday to arrest him for alleged stone-throwing, according to Addameer.

According to his family, Izz al-Din received phone calls from Israel’s Shin Bet secret police calling him “Izz al-Din Jarrar” – an implicit threat that he would meet the same fate as Ahmad Nasser Jarrar – if he did not turn himself in.

Jarrar was extrajudicially executed by Israeli occupation forces in February, after avoiding capture for several weeks.

Revenge campaign

Izz al-Din was the cousin of 17-year-old Ahed Tamimi, who is currently jailed by the Israeli military for shoving and slapping a heavily armed occupation soldier last December.

An Israeli parole board denied Ahed early release from her eight-month sentence, claiming she “has no remorse and thus remains dangerous,” according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Ahed’s lawyer Gaby Lasky “argued to the board that [Ahed’s] actions were mostly political speech and had not really endangered anyone,” The Jerusalem Post reported.

Lasky tweeted that the teenager told the parole board that “on her way there she heard that her cousin [Izz al-Din] had been killed today and that there is no justice under occupation.”

Izz al-Din is the third member of the Tamimi family killed by Israeli forces in Nabi Saleh since the village began its nonviolent resistance campaign in 2009 to Israel’s theft of land for colonial settlements.

In January, Israeli forces shot dead another relative, 16-year-old Musab Tamimi, in the village of Deir Nitham, making him the first Palestinian child to be killed by Israeli forces in 2018.

Manal Tamimi, a relative of Izz al-Din, has said that more than 20 members of the Tamimi family have been killed by occupation forces since 1976.

Israeli leaders have frequently vowed revenge against the Tamimi family and enforced collective punishment on their entire village of Nabi Saleh because of their activism.

On Thursday, Manal posted a picture of four Tamimi boys sitting around a table. Three of the boys are in Israeli prisons, she said, and the fourth is Izz al-Din.

Israeli forces raided Nabi Saleh in February and arrested 10 members of the Tamimi family, six of them children.

Addameer said that Wednesday’s raid that killed Izz al-Din Tamimi was part of a “common pattern” where Israeli “special forces initially entered the village, followed by a large number of jeeps and soldiers.”

Hebron killing

Israeli forces have killed approximately 160 Palestinians since the start of 2018, the vast majority fatally shot by snipers while taking part in the Great March of Return rallies in the occupied Gaza Strip.

Last Saturday, in the West Bank city of Hebron, soldiers shot dead 37-year-old Rami Sabarna from the nearby village of Beit Ummar.

Palestinian media circulated photos of Sabarna following his slaying:

The Israeli army claimed that Sabarna, who worked on a construction site in the area, had tried to run over soldiers with a bulldozer.

However, Aaref Jaber, a member of the group Human Rights Defenders in Hebron, told the Ma’an News Agency that soldiers had killed Sabarna deliberately.

“Sabarna was driving a Bobcat excavator while another worker walked next to him,” Jaber said.

“Israeli soldiers asked them to stop when he was at least 10 meters away from them,” Sabarna added. “The walking worker stopped, but Sabarna apparently did not hear the soldiers and continued on his way so they opened fire at him until he was killed.”

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Tamara Nassar

Tamara Nassar is an assistant editor at The Electronic Intifada.