Video has emerged of the ­moment an unarmed 16-year-old Palestinian boy was shot dead by a sniper during the Jenin military operation there last week, demolishing Israel’s claims that only combatants were killed.

The video, which The Times has verified with witnesses, as well as with the parents of the dead teenager, appears to capture the moment Abdulrahman Hasan Ahmad Hardan died as he stood in front of the al-Amal hospital, after responding to a call from the mosque in his village to donate blood.

“My son hadn’t even turned 17,” his mother, Kifaya Hardan, said from their home in Fahmeh, in the West Bank, after watching the video. “The occupation killed him in cold blood, and accused him of taking part in armed confrontations. He wasn’t carrying a gun or anything. He was a child.”

Abdulrahman was shot at 1pm last Tuesday, the second day of ­Israel’s intensive search for weapons in the Jenin refugee camp, a hub for mostly Iranian-funded armed Palestinian militancy in the West Bank in the past two years.

The video shows him leaning forward, empty-handed, to look down the street outside the al-Amal hospital. He slumps suddenly to the ground, shot by an apparent sniper. A friend of ­Abdulrahman told the family he had tried to warn him away after spotting a sniper nearby.

Israel hailed the operation as a victory that had destroyed a militant command centre and bomb-making facilities while seizing caches of weapons.

Crucially, the Israeli Defence Forces had claimed Abdulrahman was carrying an automatic weapon when he was shot – which the video appears to rebut – and that all 12 Palestinians killed during the operation were combatants. Four of the 12 were aged under 18.

The Times visited the Hardan family home the day after noisy funerals for the dead, attended by armed militants, took place in Jenin refugee camp.

Abdulrahman’s body was carried with the others through the camp, before his father accompanied it home for a peaceful burial in the village.

The next day the family home was a place of quiet mourning for the women of the family, who gathered in a living room with Abdulrahman’s mother, father and siblings, weeping over his death. The sober scene was a far cry from other funerals, where dead fighters were celebrated as martyrs.

Militant groups such as the relatively new Jenin Brigades, Islamic Jihad and the armed wing of Fatah have little compunction about claiming non-combatants, even unarmed women and children, as their martyrs. Militants took banners to the house celebrating him as such; his family expressed their unhappiness at that – at not inconsiderable risk to themselves – but they were adamant: Abdulrahman was not a militant and did not belong to any armed group.

His mother, Kifaya, said he had used public transport to get to the al-Amal hospital in Jenin to give blood, after an appeal by the village mosque.

“I had no reason to think he would be in danger. The Israeli operation was in Jenin refugee camp and the hospital was not inside.” She wept as she described rushing to Jenin after learning that her son had been shot in the head. He died five hours later in surgery. “He was an ordinary boy, he was not a terrorist like they are saying,” she said. “Every Palestinian in their eyes is a terrorist, armed or not.”

Richard Hecht, the IDF’s international spokesman, told The Times on Thursday that Abdulrahman “was not a child”, and claimed he was 17 years old. In fact his official ID shows his date of birth as July 26, 2006 – three weeks shy of his 17th birthday.

Even at 17, he would have been legally a child under Israeli civilian and military law as well as under international law.

Lieutenant Colonel Hecht then pointed The Times to social media posts by Islamic Jihad claiming him as a fighter. It is commonplace for Palestinian militant groups to claim any male casualty as a martyr, to bolster perceptions of their strength. When Islamic Jihad posted photographs of its claimed martyrs, Abdulrahman was the only one not pictured with a firearm.

Colonel Hecht, asked if Abdulrahman had been armed, replied “Yes”. When asked with what, he answered: “An automatic rifle.”

The Times then tracked down the CCTV images from a shop next to the hospital that appears to show otherwise, corroborating the family and witness accounts. It is believed the hospital has its own CCTV, though any video from that is yet to be made public.

Article link: todayspaper.theaustralian.com.au/infinity/article_popover_share.aspx?guid=bc8eee69-1060-449f-856c-78a6bd38695c
Article source: The Australian / The Times | Catherine Philp | 11.7.23

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Israel has launched a major aerial and ground offensive into the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, its biggest military operation in the Palestinian territory in years, in what it described as an “extensive counter-terrorism effort”.

At least eight Palestinians were killed and 50 injured, 10 seriously, in the attack that began at about 1am on Monday, and the death toll is likely to rise, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

On Monday afternoon, Israeli sources suggested they would need at least another 24 hours to complete the operation.

Launching at least 10 drone strikes on buildings, a brigade of Israeli troops – suggesting between 1,000 and 2,000 soldiers – backed by armoured bulldozers and snipers on rooftops entered the city and its refugee camp, encountering fire from Palestinians, after Israel informed the White House of its plans.

The streets of Jenin were deserted on Monday except for crowds of people outside the nearest hospital, watching the gun battles at the main entrance to the camp at the end of the street. Black smoke from burning tyres and teargas filled the air. Ambulances struggled to cross impromptu Israeli checkpoints.

As explosions echoed around the city, calls to support the fighters rang out from loudspeakers in mosques.

The White House said it defended Israel’s right to security and was monitoring the situation on the West Bank closely. “We have seen the reports and are monitoring the situation closely,” a White House spokesperson said. “We support Israel’s security and right to defend its people against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups.”

Britain’s prime minster, Rishi Sunak, called on the Israeli military to exercise restraint.

“While we support Israel’s right to self defence, the protection of civilians must be prioritised,” a spokesperson said. “In any military operation, we would urge the Israel Defence Forces to demonstrate restraint in its operations and for all parties to avoid further escalation in the West Bank and Gaza.”

A spokesperson for the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, called the operation “a new war crime against our defenceless people”, while the Gaza-based militant group Hamas called on young men in the West Bank to join the fighting.

Lynn Hastings, the UN’s resident humanitarian coordinator, expressed alarm at the scale of Israeli forces operation in Jenin, adding on Twitter: “Airstrikes were used in the densely populated refugee camp. Several dead and critically wounded. Access to all injured must be ensured.”

In a joint statement, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and the domestic intelligence service, Shin Bet, said they had attacked a command centre in the Jenin refugee camp that was used by a local militant group.

Images from inside Jenin showed armed and masked Palestinian fighters on the streets as gun battles and explosions continued into Monday morning.

At a checkpoint on the outskirts of the city, the sound of increasingly heavy gun battles and aircraft overhead could be heard as the day wore on.

In an escalation of the violence, Israel carried out an airstrike near a mosque in the city that it said was being used by Palestinian gunmen to target Israeli forces. “Exchanges of fire are taking place with gunmen adjacent to a mosque in the Jenin refugee camp,” the IDF said. “An IDF aircraft struck to remove the threat.”

The joint aerial and ground incursion into the camp is the first since the 2002 battle of Jenin during the second intifada, when more than 50 Palestinians and 23 Israeli soldiers were killed in over a week of fighting, including 13 Israeli soldiers in a single incident.

Monday’s events bring the death toll of Palestinians killed this year in the West Bank to 133, part of more than a year-long rise in violence that has resulted in some of the worst bloodshed in that area in nearly two decades.

“There is bombing from the air and an invasion from the ground,” said Mahmoud al-Saadi, the director of the Palestine Red Crescent Society in Jenin. “Several houses and sites have been bombed … smoke is rising from everywhere.”

The incursion came at a time of growing pressure within Israel for a tough response to a series of attacks on settlers, including a shooting last week that killed four people.

Electricity was cut off in some parts of Jenin and military bulldozers were ploughing through narrow streets – another reminder of Israel’s incursions during the last uprising. The Palestinian Authority and Jordan condemned the violence.

The operation led to protests overnight across the West Bank, including at a checkpoint near the city of Ramallah, in which a Palestinian man died after being shot in the head by the army, and a general strike across the territory on Monday. Israel’s air defence systems were put on alert for potential retaliatory rocket fire from the blockaded Gaza Strip.

 

An IDF spokesperson, R Adm Daniel Hagari, said the operation was a focused, brigade-sized raid that was expected to last between one and three days, and Israel did not intend to hold ground.

One Israeli official said the raid was intended to “break the safe-haven mindset of the camp, which has become a hornets’ nest”. It was unclear whether the operation would trigger a wider response from Palestinian factions, drawing in militant groups in the Gaza Strip, the coastal enclave controlled by Hamas.

A senior Hamas official called on young men in the West Bank to join the fighting. Saleh al-Arouri, the deputy head of the organisation’s political bureau, said: “To our heroes in the West Bank, from the south to the north: this is your day, young men. Fight with all the weapons, all your anger and with any means possible to defend our honour in Jenin.”

A statement from the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad group in Gaza said: “The resistance will confront the enemy and defend the Palestinian people and all options are open to strike the enemy and respond to its aggression on Jenin.”

As the operation continued on Monday, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was briefed on progress and on the activity of the forces on the ground, discussing future operational plans.

The Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said his forces were “closely monitoring the conduct of our enemies. The defence establishment is ready for all scenarios.”

The camp on the outskirts of the northern West Bank city was set up in the 1950s and the ghetto-like area, home to about 11,000 people, has long been viewed as a hotbed of what Palestinians consider armed resistance and Israelis see as terrorism.

Hundreds of armed fighters from militant groups including Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah are based there, and the semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority has next to no presence.

The Jenin Brigades, a unit made up of armed men from different factions, has been blamed for several terror attacks against Israeli citizens as the security situation across Israel and the West Bank has deteriorated over the past 18 months.

Jenin and nearby Nablus have been the major targets of the now more than year-old Israeli Operation Breakwater, which has involved near-nightly raids and some of the fiercest fighting in the West Bank since the second intifada came to an end in 2005. Vigilante attacks by West Bank-based Israeli settlers against Palestinian villages are also growing in scale and scope.

Only days before a drone strike last month in Jenin, for the first time since the second intifada, the army used helicopter gunships to help extract troops and vehicles from a raid on the city, after fighters used explosives against a force sent in to arrest two suspects.

After the last major raid in Jenin, Palestinian gunmen killed four Israelis near a Jewish settlement in the West Bank in an attack that led to a rampage by settlers in Palestinian villages and towns.

Article link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/03/palestinians-killed-israeli-strike-west-bank-jenin
Article source: The Guardian | Bethan McKernan in Jenin and Peter Beaumont | Tue 4 Jul 2023

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Jerusalem: Israeli drones struck targets in a militant stronghold in the occupied West Bank early on Monday and hundreds of troops were deployed in the area, an incursion that resembled the wide-scale military operations carried out during the second Palestinian uprising two decades ago. Palestinian health officials said at least eight Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded.

Troops remained inside the Jenin refugee camp early on Monday, pushing ahead with the largest operation in the area during more than a year of fighting. It came at a time of growing domestic pressure for a tough response to a series of attacks on Israeli settlers – including a shooting attack last week that killed four people.

Black smoke rose from the crowded streets of the camp as the military pressed on. According to Palestinian media reports, the operation disrupted life for local residents, with electricity cut off in some parts and a military bulldozer seen driving through narrow streets – another reminder of Israel’s incursions during the last uprising. The Palestinians condemned the violence.

With the sounds of gunfire and explosives heard across the city hours after the strike and drones clearly audible overhead, the Jenin Brigades, a unit made up of different militant groups based in the city’s large refugee camp, said it was engaging the Israeli forces.

“What is going on in the refugee camp is real war,” said Palestinian ambulance driver Khaled Alahmad. “There were strikes from the sky targeting the camp, every time we drive in around five to seven ambulances and we come back full with injured people.”

The Israeli military said its forces struck a building that served as a command centre for fighters from the Jenin Brigades in what it described as an extensive counterterrorism effort in the West Bank.

Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht, an army spokesman, said the operation began just after 1am with an airstrike on a building used by militants for planning attacks. He said the goal of the operation was to destroy and confiscate weapons.

“We’re not planning to hold ground,” he said. “We’re acting against specific targets.”

He said that a brigade-size force – about 2000 soldiers – was taking part in the operation, and that military drones had carried out a series of strikes to clear the way for the ground forces. Although Israel has carried out isolated airstrikes in the West Bank in recent weeks, Hecht said Monday’s series of strikes marked an escalation unseen since 2006 – the end of the Palestinian uprising.

While Israel described the attack as a pinpoint operation, videos on Palestinian social media showed a large tuft of white smoke billowing from a crowded area, with a mosque minaret nearby. Other videos showed a wounded man was brought into a hospital on a stretcher, while another was carried in by a group of men.

According to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, the military blocked roads within the camp, took over houses and buildings and set up snipers on rooftops. The agency also said the military cut off electricity in large areas of the camp and that army bulldozers caused damage to property.

Lynn Hastings, the United Nations humanitarian co-ordinator in the Palestinian areas, wrote on Twitter that she was “alarmed by scale of Israeli forces operation,” noting the air strikes in a densely populated refugee camp. She said the UN was mobilising humanitarian aid.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said at least eight Palestinians were killed and 50 people were wounded – 10 critically. In a separate incident, a 21-year-old Palestinian was killed by Israeli fire near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the ministry said.

“Our Palestinian people will not kneel, will not surrender, will not raise the white flag, and will remain steadfast on their land in the face of this brutal aggression,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for the Palestinian president, said in a statement.

The Jenin camp and an adjacent town of the same name have been a flashpoint as Israeli-Palestinian violence escalated since the spring of 2022. Jenin has long been a bastion for armed struggle against Israel and was a major friction point in the last Palestinian uprising.

Hundreds of armed fighters from militant groups including Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah are based in the refugee camp.

As daylight broke on Monday, thick black smoke from burning tyres set alight by residents swirled through the streets while calls to support the fighters rang out from loudspeakers in mosques.

In 2002, days after a Palestinian suicide bombing during a large Passover gathering that killed 30 people, Israeli troops launched a massive operation in the Jenin camp. For eight days and nights they fought militants street by street, using armoured bulldozers to destroy rows of homes, many of which had been booby-trapped.

Monday’s raid came two weeks after another violent confrontation in Jenin and after the military said a rocket was fired from the area last week, which landed in the West Bank.

“There has been a dynamic here around Jenin for the last year,” Hecht said, defending Monday’s tactics. “It’s been intensifying all the time.”

But there also may have been political considerations at play. Leading members of Israel’s far-right government, which is dominated by West Bank settlers and their supporters, have been calling for a broader military response to the ongoing violence in the area.

“Proud of our heroes on all fronts and this morning especially of our soldiers operating in Jenin,” National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist who recently called for Israel to kill “thousands” of militants if necessary, tweeted. “Praying for their success.”

Monday’s deaths bring the death toll of Palestinians killed this year in the West Bank to more than 130, part of more than a yearlong spike in violence that has seen some of the worst bloodshed in that area in nearly two decades.

The outburst of violence escalated last year after a spate of Palestinian attacks prompted Israel to step up its raids in the West Bank.

Israel says the raids are meant to beat back militants. The Palestinians say such violence is inevitable in the absence of any political process with Israel and increased West Bank settlement construction and violence by extremist settlers. They see the intensifying Israeli military presence in the area as an entrenchment of Israel’s 56-year open-ended occupation of the territory.

Israel says most of those killed have been militants, but stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and also people not involved in the confrontations have also been killed.

Palestinian attacks against Israelis since the start of this year have killed 24 people.

Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek those territories for their hoped-for independent state.

Article link: https://www.theage.com.au/world/middle-east/three-palestinians-killed-as-israel-launches-attack-on-west-bank-city-20230703-p5dldr.html
Article source: The Age / AP, Reuters |Josef Federman | July 3, 2023

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Israeli forces killed nine Palestinians in a large-scale operation Monday in the occupied West Bank that the army labelled an “extensive counterterrorism effort,” involving air strikes and hundreds of troops.

The raid, launched under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government, targeted the northern city of Jenin and was the biggest in the West Bank for years, featuring armoured vehicles, army bulldozers and drones.

Since the start of the operation in the early hours of Monday about 3,000 people had left their homes in the Jenin refugee camp, deputy governor of Jenin, Kamal Abu al-Roub told AFP, adding arrangements were being made to house them in schools and other shelters in the city of Jenin.

Firefights and explosions rocked the city and adjacent refugee camp, a militant stronghold home to about 18,000 people, as Palestinians threw rocks at soldiers and smoke from blasts and burning barricades darkened the sky, an AFP correspondent said.

“There is bombing from the air and an invasion on the ground,” said Mahmoud al-Saadi, director of the Palestinian Red Crescent in Jenin.

“Several houses and sites have been bombed… smoke is rising from everywhere.”

Nine people were killed and 100 others wounded, 20 of them seriously, the Palestinian health ministry said — exceeding the toll of seven dead in an Israeli raid in Jenin two weeks ago which saw the rare use of helicopter missile fire.

Netanyahu said in a statement that Israeli forces in “the nest of terrorists in Jenin” were “destroying command centres and seizing considerable weaponry”.

The Palestinian foreign ministry called the escalation “an open war against the people of Jenin”.

Army spokesman Daniel Hagari told reporters that Israeli troops did “not intend to stay in the camp”, but “we are getting ready for the more severe situation” of prolonged fighting.

The army said soldiers and gunmen exchanged fire at a mosque in the Jenin camp and that weapons and explosives were later found in the building.

Jenin resident Badr Shagoul told AFP: “I saw them taking bulldozers into the camp, they were destroying buildings … These were people’s homes.”

At a hospital morgue some bodies were covered in blankets and others were heavily bandaged, an AFP correspondent said, adding that the fighting continued into the late evening.

“In the last five years, this is the worst raid,” nurse Qasem Benighader said, noting “many” patients with bullet wounds and injuries from explosives.

Israel had already stepped up operations in the northern West Bank, which has seen a recent spate of attacks on Israelis as well as Jewish settler violence targeting Palestinians.

Jenin camp resident Mahmoud Hawashin called the situation “catastrophic”, and predicted that “if there is more Palestinian blood shed, there will be more Israeli blood shed.”

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is “deeply concerned” about the violence, and called for the respect of international humanitarian law, a spokesman said in a statement.

– ‘Escalating campaigns’ –

The Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad said “all options are open to strike the enemy in response to its aggression in Jenin”.

The United States said ally Israel had a right to “defend its people against… terrorist groups” but called for protection of civilians.

The Arab League said it will convene an emergency meeting Tuesday to discuss “an Arab mobilisation to counter the Israeli attack on Jenin”.

Neighbouring Jordan called the raid “a clear violation of international humanitarian law”, while the United Arab Emirates urged “the immediate halt of repeated and escalating campaigns against the Palestinian people”.

Earlier on Monday the army said it had struck a “joint operations centre” of a group called the Jenin Brigade, a weapons depot, an “observation and reconnaissance” site and a hideout for alleged attackers of Israeli targets.

Army spokesman Richard Hecht said troops were after “specific targets”, adding the operation had no defined timeline.

Israeli-Palestinian violence has worsened since last year, and escalated further under the Netanyahu coalition government that includes extreme-right allies.

The Jenin area is nominally controlled by president Mahmud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, which has partial administrative control in the West Bank.

In a separate incident, Israeli fire killed a Palestinian youth near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the Palestinian health ministry said.

– Settlements –

Israel has occupied the West Bank since the Six-Day War of 1967.

Excluding annexed east Jerusalem, the territory is now home to around 490,000 Israelis in settlements considered illegal under international law.

The Palestinians, who seek their own independent state, want Israel to withdraw from all land it seized in 1967 and to dismantle all Jewish settlements.

Netanyahu, however, has pledged to “strengthen settlements” and expressed no interest in reviving peace talks, moribund since 2014.

After last month’s Jenin raid, four Israelis were killed by two Palestinian gunmen — who were shot dead — near the West Bank settlement of Eli.

That same week, Israel said a drone strike killed three members of a “terrorist cell” in the West Bank.

At least 186 Palestinians, 25 Israelis, one Ukrainian and one Italian have been killed this year, according to an AFP tally compiled from official sources from both sides.

They include, on the Palestinian side, combatants and civilians, and on the Israeli side, mostly civilians and three members of the Arab minority.

Article link: https://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/israeli-army-kills-4-palestinians-in-west-bank-air-strikes-palestinian-health-ministry/news-story/3531d66b5d850a1de627d085747ec7a5
Article source: News.com.au / AFP | July 4, 2023

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