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Three martyrs in 24 hours

Palestinian youth and resistance fighters in Nablus continue to resist settler-colonial encroachment and pay the price for it.

On Thursday morning, November 24, Palestinians in the northern occupied West Bank city of Nablus bid farewell to Mohammad Hirzallah, 30, Mohammad Kishik, 22, and Ahmad Shehadeh, 16.

The three Palestinians died within 24 hours of one another, the result of Israel’s ongoing military campaign against armed Palestinian resistance in the West Bank, Operation Break the Wave

On Tuesday evening, November 22, Israeli forces invaded Nablus City in order to escort a number of Israeli settlers into the Joseph’s Tomb area of the city, sparking confrontations in the area with Palestinian youth, as well as armed Palestinian resistance fighters. 

According to Wafa News Agency, Israeli forces fired live ammunition, rubber bullets, tear gas, and sound grenades at Palestinians as they confronted the soldiers. Kishik was shot in the stomach on Tuesday night, and was declared dead by the Palestinian Ministry of Health on Wednesday night. 

During the same Israeli raid, Ahmed Shehadeh, 16, was shot with a bullet to the heart. According to the health ministry, Shehadeh was injured shortly after midnight on Wednesday, and quickly succumbed to his wounds. 

Neither Kishik or Shehadeh were reported to be part of the armed resistance groups who confronted Israeli forces during the raid. 

Death of a lion

On Wednesday evening, at Ramallah’s Istishari hospital, Mohammad Hirzallah succumbed to wounds he sustained during a military raid on Nablus earlier in July of this year. 

Hirzallah, identified as a member of the Lion’s Den resistance group, was injured on July 24 while confronting Israeli forces invading the al-Yasmina neighborhood of the Old City of Nablus. Two Palestinian resistance fighters were killed during the military operation, Muhammad Azizi, 25, and Abdul Rahman Sobh, 28

Just 16 days after Hirzallah sustained his injury, 18-year-old Ibrahim Al-Nabulsi, “the Lion of Nablus,” was extra-judicially assassinated by Israeli forces on August 9, sparking the growth of the armed resistance group. Al-Nabulsi was believed to have been the target of the July military operation where Hirzallah was injured. 

Since the start of the year, when Israel first launched “Break the Wave,” the Israeli security apparatus has escalated its policy of extra-judicial killings and “liquidation”. As a result, 202 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, Gaza, and historic Palestine since the start of the year.

Many of the Palestinians killed were non-combatants, and more than a quarter of those killed are children and minors. 

Palestinians attend the funeral of Mohammad Abu Kishk and Mohammad Harzallah in the West Bank city of Nablus on November 24, 2022. (Photo: Wajed Nobani/APA Images)

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that 204 Palestinians had been killed since the start of the year. The number was corrected to 202, to reflect the most recent data published by the Palestinian Health Ministry.

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Historical context for all of this – emphasis mine:

https://theintercept.com/2022/11/25/tantura-movie-israel-palestine/

“Tantura” Exposes the Lie at the Heart of Israel’s Founding Myth…The state of Israel so fears its own history that it passed a law, in 2011, penalizing anyone who commemorates the day of its establishment as one of mourning rather than celebration. Dubbed the “Nakba law” after the Arabic word for “catastrophe,” which Palestinians have always used in reference to the establishment of the Israeli state and their own displacement, the law captures the existential anxiety of a country that has never acknowledged its past even as it continues to struggle with its ramifications….“For Israelis, the founding myth is that the Palestinians just ran away by themselves,” Alon Schwarz, an Israeli filmmaker, told me when we recently met. “Israel is lying to itself.”…The film, opening in theaters in the U.S. next month,  tells a story few Israelis want to hear — “a story they don’t know what to do with,”

Briefly, for the record:
“Survival of the fittest”
By Ari Shavit Haaretz, January 8, 2004
https://www.haaretz.com/1.5262454
Ari Shavit interviews Benny Morris
EXCERPT:
“According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were perpetrated in 1948?”
“Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field – they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village – she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing & killed anything that moved.
“The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had been known until now. The same at Arab al Muwassi, in the north. About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram [in the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was a unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion.
“That can’t be chance. It’s a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres.”