“When I saw the occupation soldiers shooting inside the room, I put my head under the blanket and hid,” said Alaa Husseiniyya, 13, who witnessed an Israeli military operation carried out by special forces on Saturday in Jenin.
The operation took place in Jenin’s Jabariyat neighborhood, targeting Palestinian resistance fighters who were in the vicinity of the house where Alaa was sleeping alongside his uncles.
Alaa told Mondoweiss that Israeli soldiers raided the room in which he and his uncles slept and started shooting at them randomly. Alaa recounted that when he lifted the blanket from his head, he saw his uncle, Majd Husseiniyya, wounded and lying on the ground. Beside him was another man, Mujahid Balas, injured in both legs and lying on the floor just outside the room.
The Israeli forces seized one of the injured men and strapped him to the front of a military vehicle, driving around while parading him as a human shield before eventually handing him over to Palestinian medical teams, who transported him to a hospital in Jenin.
One eyewitness, who preferred to remain anonymous, told Mondoweiss that the Israeli forces deliberately mistreated the injured man.
“They appeared to be toying with him for amusement,” the eyewitness said, pointing out that the man was neither wanted nor a resistance fighter, but an unarmed civilian. This was evidenced by the fact that Israeli forces did not arrest him but handed him over to the Palestinian ambulance after he had been left strapped to the front of the vehicle for several minutes in the hot summer sun.
Ra’fat Husseiniyya, the owner of the home that was raided, said that the young men were sleeping in his house as they did every night. There army had nothing against them, and they were not suspected of any resistance activity, Ra’fat said. But the Israeli special forces shot them directly while they were sleeping.
He went on to say that the soldiers interrogated him and asked him about his relation to the men in the home. He told them that they were his brothers and that there was no justification for raiding the house and arresting them. He explained that the occupation army delayed providing medical aid to his brother Majd for hours before administering first aid to him.
According to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth, the Israeli army is investigating the incident of the man strapped to the army vehicle.
During the Israeli operation, which lasted for about three hours, the Israeli forces set fire to a civilian vehicle that was parked in front of the besieged house. Armed clashes broke out between resistance fighters and the Israeli soldiers after the special forces were discovered by the resistance. The soldiers fired at civilians and among the houses during these clashes.
During the raid, the Jenin Brigade announced via its Telegram channel that it had discovered the special forces in the Jabariyat neighborhood and engaged them in battle, targeting the invading force with live ammunition and locally improvised explosive devices. Later, the Brigade reported that it had targeted infantry soldiers, confirming that it had inflicted casualties among them.
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society reported that its teams dealt with three people injured by live ammunition in the Jabariyat area.
The Israeli forces arrested three young men during the raid on the neighborhood, one of whom was the injured Majd Husseiniyya. The nature of his injury is still unknown. The Israeli army transported him to the hospital by helicopter at the Salem checkpoint, west of the city.
The family has stated that they have received no information about Majd’s whereabouts or his health condition up to this point. No official authority has contacted them to inform them about his condition or to where he has been transferred.
The invasion of Jenin comes one day after an undercover Israeli special force riding in a civilian vehicle with a Palestinian license plate assassinated a leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades in Qalqilya. During the Qalqilya operation, the army pursued a Palestinian vehicle and fired at those inside, killing resistance fighters Ihab Abu Hamed and Mahmoud Mansour. Their bodies were confiscated by the army.
The Israeli army has increasingly employed tactics involving special forces dressed in civilian attire or using Palestinian civilian vehicles to conduct raids, particularly since October 7. This escalation follows a heightened presence of armed resistance in northern areas of the West Bank.
Disgusting.
Sadly, the IDF has become an army that abuses and violates the rules of war on a daily basis. The IDF spits on anyone who values ethics and moral conduct in combat. Morality is a word that is meaningless to the IDF, and the war criminals that the IDF blindly obeys.
The Israelis have killed 560 Palestinians and driven off the inhabitants of at least 18 villages in the West Bank. They have arrested more than 9,000 since Oct 7th. Now this. They drove by three Palestinian ambulances while supposedly looking for one. They claimed they were unable to put him inside due to lack of room and claim that he had been armed.
Good to see this story given prominence by the BBC this morning (Sunday).
The most moral army in the world.
The IDF needs new leadership. This shouldn’t happen in a well-run organization. First of all it’s wrong on moral grounds. Second, there is a PR war alongside the actual war in Gaza. These incidents hurt Israel’s standing and are PR disasters. It’s a leadership failure that condones abuse of Palestinians. Those in charge have to be replaced. The only way to achieve this is to vote out Netanyahu.