The Israeli occupation forces shot and killed three Palestinians in the occupied West Bank yesterday (Tuesday) morning, one in Beit Ummar in the south of the West Bank, and two brothers near Ramallah.
Mufeed Mohammad Ikhlil, 44, was shot through the head during clashes between soldiers and stone-throwing Palestinians in Beit Ummar.
Nine others were shot by live bullets, one in the chest and the others in the upper and lower limbs. They are reported to be in a serious but stable condition.
In the village of Kufr Ein, which is near Ramallah, Israeli soldiers opened fire on two brothers, Jawad and Thafer Abdul Rahman Rimawi, 22 and 21 respectively, killing them.
Jawad, a new Business Administration graduate from Birzeit University, was shot in the pelvis, and Thafer, a fourth-year Technology student also at Birzeit University, was shot through the chest.
A general strike has been declared in Ramallah as a result.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health reports that counting these three shot yesterday, the Israel army has now shot and killed 153 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since the start of the year.
The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) has also roundly condemned Israel’s killing of the two siblings near Ramallah.
Hussein al-Sheikh, secretary-general of the PLO’s Executive Committee, described the killing as an awful crime and ‘fascist’.
He tweeted yesterday: ‘An awful crime committed by the occupation forces – assassinating two brothers in Beit Rima, Ramallah, Jawad al-Rimawi and Thafer al-Rimawi.
‘Execution in cold blood is fascist behaviour by their forces and the appropriation of Palestinian blood with political instructions.’
The day before, on Monday, Mohammad Masarwa, 25, from Tulkarm, lost the sight in his right eye after Israeli occupation soldiers had assaulted him during his arrest at his family’s home on January 20 of this year.
The Palestinian Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners Affairs Commission said in a statement that the Israeli soldiers had assaulted Masarwa – who is currently in Israeli custody – with rifle butts on his head and forehead, severely injuring him and blinding him in his right eye.
It also said that Masarwa was supposed to undergo an operation on his eye this month, but that the Israel Prison Services cancelled the operation on the pretext that he is due to finish his sentence in April of next year any way after having served a year-and-a-half in prison for resisting the occupation.
The Commission said Masarwa suffers from severe stomach pains, and that he was given medication for a short period but the prison clinic stopped it without any reason.
Masarwa is a former prisoner who has already spent 20 months in Israeli prisons.
Meanwhile on Monday, the Israeli occupation authorities razed an agricultural barn in the Khirbet Khallet al-Furun locality, which is part of Birin village, near Hebron.
Rateb Jbour, a local anti-colonial-settlement activist, reported that the soldiers escorted a bulldozer to the locality, where the heavy machinery tore down an agricultural barn belonging to Ghandi Gheith, who holds the title deed proving he owns the plot of land it was built on.
He added that the Israeli measures against the locality, including demolitions, are intended to drive out the local population in order to make way for Jewish-only colonial settlement construction.
According to the Land Research Centre, Israel has frequently issued military stop-construction and demolition orders against various residential and agricultural structures and dismantled barns in the locality, on the pretext they have been built without construction permits – which are next to impossible for Palestinians to obtain.
In December 2017, Israel delivered stop-construction orders to the locality’s sole clinic, and a building intended to serve as a primary school for the community’s 60 children
In June 2019, as shown in a PLO’s Negotiations Affairs Department’s report, Israel seized 4,800 dunams of land from several localities, including Birin, for the expansion of the Jewish-only settlement of Bani Haiver.
Located to the southwest of Bani Na‘im, Birin has a population of 160 and is flanked by the Bani Haiver colonial settlement to the east and the settler-only bypass Road No. 60 from the west.
Its residents were originally expelled from Naqab in southern Israel and now depend on agriculture and livestock as their main source of livelihood.
Meanwhile, the resistance movement Hamas has urged the United Nations to add Israel to its ‘List of Shame’ and has also called on international human rights groups to protect Palestinian children against Israel.
The Israeli regime occupied the Palestinian territories during a heavily Western-backed war in 1967.
Ever since, it has been dotting the occupied territories with hundreds of settlements, which have come to house thousands of settlers, and imposed draconian restrictions on the Palestinians’ freedom of movement.
Tel Aviv withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but has been keeping the coastal strip under intermittent and indiscriminate airstrikes as well as a crippling siege and economic blockade.
Hamas’s Council on International Relations has held an international conference on the impact of the Israeli blockade on the more than two million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip.
The event was attended by representatives of the Gaza government committee and civil society organisations.
They discussed ways to tackle the repercussions of the blockade on the Strip where living conditions and standards have rapidly deteriorated under the Israeli siege.
The Hamas movement also condemned Western countries, mainly the United States, for supporting the Israeli blockade.
Speakers via video conference included Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Palestine, as well as Richard Falk, the chairman of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.
Statistics show that most Gazans are impoverished and rely on aid handouts to survive, and unemployment and poverty rates have skyrocketed.
Attendees called for the immediate lifting of the inhumane siege.
In its final communique, the conference concluded that the Gaza Strip has been devastated by the Israeli blockade and is close to breaking point.
- A leader of the Palestinian Fatah resistance movement says the Israeli regime is keeping hundreds of prisoners, including children, behind bars, and these detained minors are subjected to various forms of torture as Israeli prison officials treat them as criminals.
On Monday, Dr Ayman al-Raqab, who is also a professor of political science at Quds University, denounced the Tel Aviv regime’s gross mistreatment of Palestinian children and its flagrant violation of their rights, stating that the condition of Israeli detention centres and relevant policies contradict international principles and regulations.
Raqab noted that Israeli officials have subjected a number of jailed Palestinian children, including teenage girls, to brutal forms of torture, and treat them as serious criminals even though they are not of legal age.
The resistance movement also called on international human rights groups to protect Palestinian children against Israel.
Earlier this month, a Palestinian prisoners advocacy group reported that Israeli military forces had arrested more than 750 Palestinian children during its campaign across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since the beginning of the year
The Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS) said in a statement on November 19 that 160 children are still being held behind bars in Israeli detention centres, and some of these minors were first shot and injured before they were detained.
Among the detainees are three girls, of whom two are 16 years old and the third is 17, and five others, who are being held in administrative detention.
These so-called ‘administrative detention’ detainees are arrested on ‘secret evidence’, unaware of the accusations against them, and are not allowed to defend themselves in court.
They are usually held for renewable six-month periods, often leading to years in detention without charge or trial.
Israeli authorities use torture techniques even after transferring Palestinian detainees for interrogation and then to detention centres.
Advocacy groups have also recorded various injuries suffered by Palestinian detainees, some of whom had been shot by the Israeli military.
They are held for lengthy periods without being charged, tried, or convicted, which is in sheer violation of human rights. Human rights groups describe Israel’s use of the administrative detention as a ‘bankrupt tactic’ and have long called on Israel to end it.
The Israeli Prison Service (IPS) keeps Palestinian prisoners under deplorable conditions without proper hygienic standards. They have also been subjected to systematic torture, harassment and repression all through the years of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.
According to the Palestine Detainees Studies Centre, about 60% of the Palestinian prisoners detained in Israeli jails suffer from chronic diseases, a number of whom have died in detention or shortly after being released due to the severity of their cases.
