A PALESTINIAN was fatally shot on Monday by Israeli forces’ fire, after he carried out a shooting attack against Israelis in Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in Jerusalem.
Israeli reports said that Mesbah Abu Sbaih, 39, who was driving his car near the national headquarters of the Israeli Police in the neighbourhood, opened fire at a number of Israelis present near the station as well as at Israeli police officers deployed along the street.
Israeli police fatally shot the Palestinian after a chase through the neighbourhood.
Two Israelis reportedly succumbed to their critical injuries, whereas six others, including a police officer and a female, sustained moderate to light injuries.
On Monday Israeli forces raided the village of al-Ram in the occupied West Bank district of Jerusalem on Monday morning and detained Abu Sbaih’s 14-year-old daughter Eiman. ‘We deem my father as a martyr,’ she said in a video. ‘We hope he will plead for us before God on judgment day … I am proud of what my father did.’
Eiman said that on the day Abu Sbaih carried out the shooting, she performed dawn prayers with her father before bidding him farewell, as she expected him to turn himself in to Israeli custody.
‘I asked if he wanted me to visit him in prison, and he replied: “Take care of your prayers and your studies, and I wish that you excel in your studies,”’ she recalled in the video.
Palestinian youth from al-Ram threw stones at Israeli troops during the Monday morning raid in al-Ram. Israeli forces used large amounts of tear gas and stun grenades during the raid. Israeli forces had stormed the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Silwan and detained Abu Sbaih’s father and two of his brothers on Sunday afternoon.
Hamas said on Sunday afternoon that Abu Sbeih was a member of its Islamic resistance movement. Abu Sbaih told Palestinian media the day before the shooting that he was planning on turning himself in to Israeli authorities to serve a prison sentence for prior charges.
The 39-year-old, from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Silwan, who also lived in the village of al-Ram, said on Saturday that he had decided to turn himself into the Israeli Ramla prison at 10am on Sunday to serve a four-month prison sentence for allegedly assaulting an Israeli police officer.
He said he was detained from the Bab Hutta area in the Old City outside of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in 2013 after being accused of the assault, but was released the same day. According to Abu Sbaih, the case was closed, and he later travelled to Saudi Arabia to perform the Umrah pilgrimage.
However, the case against him was unexpectedly reopened in December 2015, shortly after he was released from spending about a year in prison on separate charges of ‘incitement’ for Facebook posts. Among the posts he was imprisoned for were: ‘We sacrifice our souls and our blood for you Al-Aqsa,’ and, ‘We sacrifice our children for Al-Aqsa.’
Last month, following his release, the Jerusalem Magistrate’s court ordered that he turn himself in by mid-October after sentencing him to four months in prison for the alleged 2013 assault. However, after being threatened by Israeli authorities that they would place him in administrative detention (internment without trial or charge) if he didn’t turn himself in immediately, he had said he had decided to turn himself in on Sunday morning, before ultimately being killed while carrying out the deadly shooting attack.
Abu Sbaih had said on Saturday that the decision to turn himself in came after being repeatedly harassed by Israeli police, as he was detained five times over the past two weeks, in some cases for a period of days, sometimes for hours. On October 2nd, he was banned from the whole of East Jerusalem for a month, after he had already been banned from entering the Al-Aqsa Mosque for six months. In July, he was also issued a travel ban until the end of the year.
According to sources in East Jerusalem, Abu Sbaih was a prominent local activist and known to some as ‘The Lion of Jerusalem’, for being on the ‘front lines’ in defending the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Old City. Ahead of Jewish holidays, the Israeli occupation applies a well-known policy, but this time they took it too far,’ Abu Sbaih said, referring to heightened security measures imposed by Israeli forces in occupied East Jerusalem amid the Jewish high holiday season.
Last week, Israeli police detained 15 Palestinians in East Jerusalem on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. Israeli police have maintained a heavy presence in the area since, as the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur begins on Tuesday.
”Jerusalem is under a serious threat of “Judaisation” and is under an unprecedented attack by the Israeli authorities,’ Abu Sbaih said. He had served a total of 39 months in Israeli custody.
Tensions around occupied East Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque compound were a main contributor to a wave of unrest that began last October, after right-wing Israelis made frequent visits to the site during the Jewish holiday season this time last year.
The 39-year-old fighter was the 232nd Palestinian to be killed by Israelis amid the violence, while 34 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians. Israel arrested dozens of Palestinians on Monday, including 31 Palestinians seeking to participate in celebrations in memory of Abu Sbaih. Some 15 other Palestinians were arrested for throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli forces in east Jerusalem.
l Israeli forces demolished multiple homes belonging to the same family in the Bedouin village of Bir Hadaj in the Negev desert of southern Israel on Sunday afternoon, according to locals.
Village resident Ayish Abu al-Asa said that armed Israeli police forces arrived at the village in large numbers, surrounded and cordoned off the area for demolition, before allowing bulldozers to go in and demolish the homes. Said al-Kharumi, secretary of the Higher Guidance Committee of Arab Residents in the Negev, a local committee dedicated to fighting Israeli government demolitions of Bedouin homes, said that Sunday’s events represented ‘a violent and racist campaign’ on the part of the Israeli government in the Negev.
He said: ‘The campaign targeting the houses of the Abu Murayhil family west of Bir Hadaj was carried out in order to expel them from the area.’ He added that ‘Israeli authorities are trying to impose their resolutions on the people there by force, demolition, and destruction.’
‘This racist, unjust policy to subdue our people in Bir Hadaj will fail, as prior attempts did. The houses will be built again and our people will continue to live with dignity on their land,’ al-Kharumi said.
It remained unclear what reason was provided, if at all, to the residents for the demolitions. It also remained unclear exactly how many structures were demolished, and how many members of the Abu Murayhil family were left homeless.
Most recently, Israeli forces demolished the ‘unrecognised’ Bedouin village of al-Araqib for the 104th time on Thursday. Bir Hadaj and al-Araqib are two of 35 Bedouin villages considered ‘unrecognised’ by Israel. According to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), more than half of the approximately 160,000 Negev Bedouins reside in ‘unrecognised’ villages.
Rights groups have claimed that the demolition of homes and entire ‘unrecognised’ Bedouin villages is a central Israeli policy aimed at removing the indigenous Palestinian population from the Negev and transferring them to government-zoned townships to make room for the expansion of Jewish Israeli communities.
Indigenous rights groups have also pointed out that the transfer of the Bedouins into densely populated townships also removes them from their traditional semi-nomadic lifestyles which is dependent on access to a wide range of grazing land for their animals.
