Rights and Accountability 18 October 2017
Video shows a Palestinian man being shot by Israeli soldiers while he posed no apparent threat on Wednesday:
Witnesses told a Palestinian media outlet that the man was attempting to catch a bus when he was shot.The security camera footage shows a figure running across a road before he is shot and falls to the ground.
The army claimed that the man, who had not yet been identified at the time of publication, was armed with a knife and was running towards soldiers when he was shot.
But he was not near any other person, and does not appear to pose an immediate threat to anyone’s life at the time that he is shot. It is not apparent from the video that he was carrying a knife or attempting any attack when he was wounded.
Another video taken immediately after the shooting shows the man lying on the ground as soldiers gather around him:
The incident took place at the Gush Etzion junction outside the settlement bloc of the same name near the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem.The injured man was arrested and hospitalized.
Several Palestinians have been killed at the Gush Etzion junction in the past two years, most recently Abdullah Taqatqa, 24, in July, and Suhaib Mashahra, 21, in April.
Numerous human rights groups, a United Nations human rights investigator, and the US State Department and American lawmakers have all raised concerns over Israel’s reflexive use of deadly force against alleged Palestinian attackers. Amnesty International stated last year that several such cases should be investigated as possible extrajudicial executions.
Such incidents have occurred at checkpoints and settlements throughout the West Bank, where for half a century Israel has imposed a belligerent military occupation to expand its settler-colonial enterprise and brutally stamp out Palestinian resistance to it.
The Israeli rights group B’Tselem has called for figures at the senior level of the Israeli government and military to be held to account for an open-fire policy which “conveys profound disregard for the lives of Palestinians.”
The rights group puts blame not only at the feet of Israel’s armed forces, but also at its political leadership, “whose public statements have made it clear that any Palestinian who attacks Israelis – or is suspected of attempting to do so – should be killed.”
If the young man shot at Gush Etzion on Wednesday was only trying to catch a bus when he was wounded by soldiers, he won’t have been the first.
Last year a Palestinian man was attempting to cross a road to catch a taxi on his way to a chemotherapy session when he was shot by soldiers. Muhammad Amar Jallad, who was being treated for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, died of his injuries months later.
Nearly 60 Palestinians have died by Israeli fire so far this year. Fifteen Israelis and a British national have been killed by Palestinians during the same period.
