Three Palestinian minors and one 19-year-old were killed in the governorates of Ramallah, Qalqilya, and Jenin within the span of 24 hours. For the past nine months, Palestinians have experienced the deadliest year in their confrontation of Israeli colonialism since 2015. The death toll has reached 164 since the start of 2022.
On October 7, Israeli military forces shot and killed 16-year-old Adel Ibrahim Daoud in the city of Qalqilya, north of Ramallah. Hours later, the military invaded al-Gharbiyya 11 km northwest of Ramallah, killing 17-year-old Mahdi Ladadweh.
The next day, on October 8, at approximately 1:00 p.m., as Palestinians finished burying Ladadweh in Mazra’a al-Gharbiyya, another two Palestinians were killed in Jenin refugee camp.
In a coordinated military invasion, Jenin refugee camp was assaulted under the pretext of arresting a wanted Palestinian resistance fighter, Mohammad Abu Zeina. The invasion resulted in the killing of Mohammad El-Sous, 18, and Ahmad Daraghmeh, 16. Eleven others were injured, including 3 in critical condition, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Israel’s “liquidation” policy is an acceleration of the colonial project
According to eyewitnesses, at approximately 9:00 a.m. on October 7, Israeli military forces invaded the city of Jenin, making a direct line towards Jenin refugee camp. In coordination with the Israeli intelligence (the Shin Bet), the army fired live ammunition and stationed snipers on top of residential buildings.
According to eyewitnesses and journalists on the ground, the Israeli army had also employed the use of Apache helicopters during the invasion, reminiscent of the Israeli army’s invasion of the camp two decades earlier during the 2002 – 2004 invasion, Operation Defensive Shield.
Ever since last February, Israel has implemented an ongoing military operation in the West Bank cracking down on Palestinian armed resistance.
But last night’s raid marked a new development.
Israel has in recent years gradually rejuvenated its decades-old policy of extra-judicial assassinations of “matlubeen,” or wanted Palestinians, and is now using it with a regularity that resembles the policy of “liquidation” during early 2000 and 1993.
When Israel had employed this practice after the Intifada of 1987 – 1993, a Human Rights Watch investigation concluded that Israel operated with “a license to kill” policy, which led to a string of assassinations of Palestinian activists.
In almost four decades, not only has this practice remained an important component in Israel’s repressive arsenal, but it does so with utter impunity, despite condemnation from human rights organizations. The media has not been spared this liquidation campaign, as with the murder of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, and in the recent invasion of Jenin refugee camp, four local journalists, Mohammad Abed, Mujahed El-Saadi, Jaafar Shtayyeh, and Nidal Shtayyeh were surrounded and shot at directly.
In July of this year, the Israeli military chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, suggested ramping up extra-judicial assassinations beyond Palestinian territory.
The assassinations of Palestinian resistance fighters, therefore, may be a precursor to many more assassinations to come, perhaps even extending internationally.
Mariam Barghouti
Mariam Barghouti is the Senior Palestine Correspondent for Mondoweiss.
From ReliefWeb ( “ReliefWeb is a humanitarian information service provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) “, April:
https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/israel-killed-five-times-many-palestinians-2022-it-killed-same
Israel killed five times as many Palestinians in 2022 than it killed in the same period in 2021…Israeli forces have significantly escalated the killing and repression of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem during the past several days, following a green light from the political officials in Israel, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said….the killings witnessed a remarkable increase during the year. In January, five Palestinians were killed, and in February, six Palestinians were killed, and in March, the number rose to 18, while 18 Palestinians were killed in just 14 days in this April.
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In 2001, renowned historian Edward Said called Leon Uris’s 1958 novel “Exodus” ‘the main narrative model that dominates American thinking’ about Israel. As Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston wrote in 2012 in an article entitled “The ‘Exodus’ Effect: ‘The monumentally fictional Israel that remade American Jewry,’ Uris’s narrative ‘Tailor[ed], alter[ed] & radically sanitized the history of the founding of the State of Israel to flatter the fantasies & prejudices of American Jews.’ Burston quotes American Zionist Jeffrey Goldberg, who served in the IDF as a prison guard, to the effect that ‘Exodus made American Jews proud of Israel’s achievements. On the other hand, it created the impression that all Arabs are savages.’ And he quotes none other than David Ben-Gurion: ‘As a literary work it isn’t much…But as a piece of propaganda, it’s the best thing ever written about Israel.’”
“Of course, even more Americans owe their education in Zionism to Otto Preminger’s 1960 movie version of the book, which has been ‘Widely characterized as a ‘Zionist epic’ [that was] enormously influential in stimulating Zionism and support for Israel in the United States.’ ‘It was Exodus, the movie, that really viralized (as we say now) the ‘Exodus-effect.’ (The Polemicist, Sept. 22, 2014, “Israel’s Human ‘Shield Hypocrisy,’ The Early Days”)
“Yet Exodus was not the product of a virgin birth; its origin has been described by a public relations practitioner named Art Stevens in a book called The Persuasion Explosion. He writes that ‘skillful public relations can speed up the acceptance of a concept whose time has come. A striking example of this involved eminent public relations consultant Edward Gottlieb. In the early 1950s, when the newly formed State of Israel was struggling for recognition in the court of world opinion, America was largely apathetic. Gottlieb, who at that time headed his own public relations firm, suddenly had a hunch about how to create a more sympathetic attitude towards Israel. He chose a writer and sent him to Israel with instructions to soak up the atmosphere of the country and create a novel about it. The book turned out to be Exodus by Leon Uris. His novel did more to popularize Israel with the American public than any other single presentation through the media.’” (Art Stevens, The Persuasion Explosion, Washington, D.C; Acropolis Books, 1985, pp. 104-105). (cont’d)
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“’Stevens notes that unhappily for Uris’s pretensions to objectivity, Uris became carried away by the passion of his own propaganda. He followed Exodus with another book on the Middle East called The Haj, which an Israeli reviewer in the Jerusalem Post described as ‘a raving diatribe against Arabs, their culture & their religion,’ adding that it ‘depicts Arabs in a manner that would make Meir Kahane blush.’” (“The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present,” by George W. Ball, undersecretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, US ambassador to the UN, and his son, Douglas, (W.W. Norton and Company, Inc. New York, N.Y., 1992, p. 200 and p. 348.)
With Israeli elections in 2 weeks, and US midterms in about 3, I’m fearful of another massive attack on Gaza, with the accompanying carpet bombing of infrastructure and innocent civilians fleeing for their lives. I hope I’m wrong, but it’s during times like the present when Israel has ‘gone mad’. With an election-weakened president and an always-compliant congress, there’s little reason to believe this won’t happen sooner than later.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/10/palestinian-child-shot-by-israeli-army-in-jenin-dies-from-wounds
A six year old boy has been arrested and detained during a raid on the town of Jenin by an”Elite” IDF unit. It is alleged that the boy was part of a group of Palestinian boys playing football and that during the game the boy threw the ball “aggressively at an IDF soldier. It is alleged that the soldier suffered a mild concussion but that his condition is not life threatening.
The boy remains in detention and is being interrogated as a suspected terrorist.
An IDF spokeperson stated that all aggressive actions against its soldiers are classified as “terrorist” and will be dealt with accordingly.
He praised the soldier for his restraint in not using his weapons to neutralize the “terrorist”.
A spokesman for a nearby illegal settlers community criticised the soldier for his failure to shoot the boy.