The Israeli military killed four Palestinians in less than 24 hours on Sunday in the occupied West Bank, including one child, and a partially blind widow of six children.
The four Palestinians, who were killed in four separate incidents in areas across the West Bank, were all killed within a few hours of one another.
On Sunday morning, Israeli soldiers stationed in the village of Hussan, south of Bethlehem, shot and killed 47-year-old Ghada Sabateen at a flying checkpoint in the village. According to local Arabic news outlets, Sabateen, a widow and mother of six, was partially blind in one eye.
The army claimed that they shot her after she had approached the armed soldiers, who were stationed on a main road in the village, in a “suspicious manner.” The army later confirmed that she was unarmed.
Sabateen was shot in the leg, and succumbed to her wounds after suffering from a torn artery and massive blood loss, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said.
A few hours later, in the southern West Bank city of Hebron, Israeli forces shot and killed another Palestinian woman, identified by the health ministry as 24-year-old Maha Kazim al-Zaatry.
She was shot outside the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, where Israel maintains a heavily militarized checkpoint and frequently shoots Palestinians. Israeli border patrol said that al-Zaatry allegedly attempted to stab officers stationed at the checkpoint, and that one officer was “lightly hurt.”
Later in the evening, the Israeli army shot and killed a young Palestinian man in the town of al-Khader in southern Bethlehem, after he allegedly threw Molotov cocktails on a highway near a major settlement bloc south of the town.
He was identified as Mohammad Ali Ghneim. Israeli media outlets reported Ghneim’s age as 21, though an ID card that was found with his body showed that he was 19.
Early Monday morning, a Palestinian teenager, 17-year-old Mohammad Zakarneh, also known as Mohammed Qassim, from Jenin, succumbed to wounds he sustained in his abdomen from Israeli army fire on Sunday night.
According to Wafa News Agency, Zakarneh was shot by an Israeli special forces unit during a targeted attack on a vehicle in Jenin city on Sunday. According to Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP), he is the sixth Palestinian child killed by Israel this year.
The killings of Sabateen, al-Zaatary, Ghneim, and Zakarneh come on the heels of a turbulent few weeks in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory. Since the beginning of Ramadan, Israeli police have violently cracked down on Palestinians in the Old City of Jerusalem, injuring and arresting dozens.
Since March 22, a total of 14 people have been killed in four attacks in Israel. 14 Palestinians have been killed during the same time period.
Following a shooting in Tel Aviv last week that left three Israelis dead, Israel has carried out massive operations in the Jenin area, where the shooter was from, and has imposed widespread punitive measures on the entire district.
On Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in a statement that “there are not and will not be limits for this war. We are granting full freedom of action to the army, the Shin Bet [domestic intelligence agency] and all security forces in order to defeat the terror.”
Palestinians have said that Bennett’s statements have given the green light for Israeli forces to use excessive force against Palestinians, and kill people on mere suspicions.
This needs to be called what it is. State Sponsored Terrorism.
If lone wolf attacks against Israelis by desperate and oppressed Palestinians who have known nothing but Apartheid and resisting more than a half century of brutal occupation is “terrorism”, then the routine systematic extrajudicial killings of innocent civilians by a belligerent occupying military force on a near weekly basis is also “terrorism”.
When Russia does exactly this in Ukraine, the US can’t call for investigations into war crimes fast enough, when Israel has spent decades doing this, the US looks the other way claiming it’s merely “self defense”.