Last week a Palestinian man in the Qalandiya refugee camp in Ramallah passed away hours after he got caught in clouds of tear gas fired by Israeli forces.
The man, Fahmi Abdelraouf Hamad, had gone to the camp’s clinic, run by UNRWA, looking to get his diabetes medication restocked.
While he was in the clinic, Israeli forces raided the camp, launching hundreds of rounds of tear gas into the camp, and in the vicinity of the UNRWA health clinic and school.
UNRWA said that the raid lasted several hours, and that their appeals to Israeli authorities to stop firing tear gas and allow their staff and patients to evacuate the clinic were “regrettably not addressed.”
Hamad suffered from suffocation due to tear gas inhalation, and was finally evacuated to a hospital in Ramallah after Israeli forces retreated from the camp. His family said that even after he was released, he continued to cough and had trouble breathing. He died that same night.
Now, I want to go back and re-read that first sentence I wrote. A Palestinian man “passed away.” While that is true, is it fair? Is it just? I don’t think so.
Hamad’s official cause of death remains unknown, but one thing is clear: he was alive and well when he went in to pick up his medications that afternoon. Hours after the Israeli raid, which left him choking and suffocating in the UNRWA clinic, he was dead.
So, was he killed? I believe so.
The month of January is over, and so far, six Palestinians, including Hamad, have been killed by Israelis, both armed forces and settlers.
UN and other official documentation has put that number at three, considering only those who were killed by “direct” action (i.e. shot) by Israeli forces — not taking into account those who were killed as a result of the actions of Israeli forces and/or settlers.
That’s often the problem with official reports that we see put out at the end of each year, looking at the “number of Palestinians killed by Israel this year.” Do we only count the victim’s of Israel’s occupation who were shot in the West Bank, or bombed in Gaza?
What about people like Hamad? Who seemingly died of suffocation from tear gas fired by Israeli forces? He’s not the first Palestinian to be killed by tear gas. It happened in 2014, when Noha Qatamish, 40, was suffocated by tear gas in her home in the Aida refugee camp. And again in 2016, at the Qalandiya checkpoint – though Israel denied it.
What about the Palestinians like 75-year-old Suleiman al-Hathalin, who was run over by an Israeli civilian-operated truck that was contracted by the Israeli police, which committed the deadly hit-and-run during a police raid?
While he did succumb to his critical wounds two weeks later, I don’t believe it accurate to say that he “died.” He was killed because of the actions of the Israeli police, and the Israeli civilian who was operating that truck. He should be counted among the victims of “Palestinians killed by Israeli (forces).”
The same goes for 80-year-old Palestinian-American Omar Abdulmajeed Asaad, who was found dead in a cold abandoned warehouse, after he was bound and gagged by Israeli soldiers in the middle of the night.
Asaad technically died of a heart attack; but is that sufficient enough for us to say he was not killed? Had he not been dragged out of his car on a cold winter night, beaten, and bound by Israeli soldiers, he would likely still be alive today.
So that’s my issue when I see the reports that leave out Palestinian victims of the occupation like Hamad, al-Hathalin, and Assad, when considering the official numbers of those “killed” in the occupied territory.
It’s the same issue I face when I see headlines about Palestinians passively “dying,” as if those who caused their deaths were not active participants in the matter.
And it’s the same issue I face myself when writing the headlines of these stories. Should I, and other journalists, be let off the hook on the technicality that the people in these cases did “die,” and were not killed in the sense that they were shot, or killed in an air strike?
I don’t think we should.
It is not enough to be “technically” truthful, when the full truth of the matter is often right in front of us.
Choosing to say that people like Hamad, al-Hathalin, and Asaad were not killed is an injustice to their memory, and to all the other Palestinian victims who have “died” as a result of Israel’s occupation.
