Link
This video shows Israeli undercover forces invading a hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus early on Sunday morning and kidnapping a Palestinian patient.
Meanwhile, two more Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces Sunday and Monday, including a 12-year-old child.
Samir al-Khayyat, the medical director of the Specialized Arab Hospital, told Ma’an News Agency that the Israeli agents, disguised as Palestinians accompanying a patient, entered the hospital around 4am.
They went up to the third floor and kidnapped 23-year-old Karam al-Masri from his bed at gunpoint. The Israelis reportedly disabled security cameras, but apparently not all of them.
The video above has been published by several Palestinian and Israeli media outlets.
Guns drawn
A still image from a security camera shows an Israeli agent with gun drawn at the Specialized Arab Hospital in Nablus.
The one-minute long clip cuts between several angles which show a group of about a dozen men walking through various parts of a hospital. At about 40 seconds it shows the men carrying or struggling with a person.
Second later, two men run past the camera with guns drawn.
Dressing up agents as what Israel believes Arab or Palestinian civilians to look like – so-calledmistaravim – is an old tactic used in everything from acting as provocateurs and spying to dozens of extrajudicial murders.
Masri’s family issued a statement to Palestinian media expressing their concern over his fate and calling for international medical bodies to intervene. The statement said that Masri, a mechanical engineer, was being treated for injuries to his right arm sustained in a work accident.
Israel’s Ynet reported that the “investigation into the wanted person who was arrested by the security forces in Nablus was placed under gag order, and the arrest was made as part of a larger series of arrests in Nablus as a result of Thursday night’s terrorist attack.”
This is a reference to the killing of two settlers in a drive-by shooting on the road between two Israeli settlements built in the Nablus area in violation of international law.
International, Israeli and Palestinian human rights agencies consistently say that Israel’s system of military courts does not afford detained or accused Palestinians minimal standards of due process and rights.
The invasion of a hospital constitutes a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which the UN Security Council, the Red Cross and other international bodies have repeatedly affirmed applies to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
Killings continue
The kidnapping of Masri comes amid ongoing, and by many accounts escalating, violence in the occupied West Bank as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered ever harsher collective punishment against Palestinians.
On Monday, 12-year-old Abdulrahman Shadi Obeidallah was fatally shot by Israeli forces in Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem. The child was taken by civilian car to nearby Beit Jala hospital where he underwent emergency surgery for a bullet wound in the chest, but did not survive, Ma’an News Agency reported.
Overnight, Sunday to Monday, Israeli occupation forces shot 18-year-old Huthayfa Othman Suleiman, fatally wounding him in the chest. The youth was reportedly shot during confrontations between Palestinians and Israeli occupation forces in the northern West Bank, near the city of Tulkarem, Ma’an News Agency reported.
Three other youths were injured by live fire in the same confrontations. The Palestine Red Crescent Society declared a state of emergency on Sunday, after more than a dozen attacks on its medical personnel and ambulances by Israeli soldiers and settlers.
Palestinians have faced a brutal crackdown by Israeli soldiers and violent attacks and property destruction by Israeli settlers in revenge for Thursday’s killing of the two settlers in the West Bank.
On Saturday, Muhannad Halabi, a Palestinian from the West Bank village of Surda, fatally stabbed an Israeli soldier and a West Bank settler in the Old City of occupied Jerusalem.
Israeli forces have ordered the destruction of the Halabi family home, a form of collective punishment, illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, that Israel reserves exclusively for Palestinians.
On Sunday, video caught the extrajudicial execution by police of Fadi Samir Alloun as the Palestinian youth fled from an Israeli mob in Jerusalem.
By Monday, the Red Crescent reported that 500 Palestinians had been injured, including 41 with live ammunition and 143 with rubber-coated steel bullets fired by Israeli forces.
Violence by Israeli occupation forces against Palestinians defending their communities are reportedly continuing, Monday, in many cities and villages across the West Bank.
Journalist injured
In this disturbing video that underscores the dangers Palestinian journalists face for doing their jobs, Hana Mahamid, the correspondent for Lebanon’s al-Mayadeen TV channel, is reporting from Jerusalem’s Issawiyeh village when she is struck in the face by an Israeli stun grenade.
Mahamid has inspired admiration from colleagues such as Gaza-based journalist Mohammed Omer for carrying on with her work despite a horrific experience that could easily have proven fatal.
No comments:
Post a Comment