IOF Kill Stone-Pelting Palestinian Child
Palestine Media Center
5 May, 2003It has barely been a week since the launching of the “roadmap” to peace in the region and already at least 19 Palestinians, including a 2-year-old toddler and three youths have lost their lives.
Only days after a fierce Israeli military onslaught on a residential Gaza Strip neighborhood, which rendered two teenage boys and a baby dead, another 14-year-old boy was killed by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in the northern West Bank on Sunday.
Zahi Hijazi from al-Dahya district of Nablus was killed by a heavy caliber bullet to the head, while eight other Palestinians, including three children, were wounded, medical sources said.
Witnesses said a group of Palestinian youths were pelting IOF troops, who had raided, using tanks and military jeeps, Balata refugee camp on the outskirts of Nablus, when they responded with live ammunition.
In the Gaza Strip meanwhile, three Palestinians were injured when IOF opened heavy fire at residential areas at the Khan Younis refugee camp and the Austrian District.
A security source said that among the wounded was a student, who was injured when IOF gunfire hit the classroom he was in at a local school in the refugee camp.
Meanwhile, Israel’s occupation soldiers maintained their large-scale detention spree across the occupied territory, where they detained 22 Palestinian citizens overnight in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus and the Gaza Strip, Palestinian eyewitnesses and security sources said.
In the northern West Bank city of Hebron, IOF demolished the flat of Tarek Abu Sneineh, who was killed in January near the illegal Israeli settlement of “Kiryat Arba.”
Abu Sneineh’s flat in a 3-storey residential building was dynamited late last night by IOF, causing damage to the other flats, residents said.
US Envoy Urges Israel to Ease Restrictions
Meanwhile, a US envoy visiting the region to discuss the “roadmap” to peace, urged Israel yesterday to ease its choking military grip on the Palestinian population, which was met with an Israeli response saying that no such changes would take place unless Palestinians stopped “violence” first.
Assistant Secretary of State William Burns was preparing the ground for the long-overdue “roadmap” to peace, which was launched immediately after Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Amen) took oath of office as the first Palestinian premier.
“Obviously the humanitarian situation for Palestinians is a very difficult one, and we very much hope that concrete steps can be taken to ease that,” Burns told reporters after talks with Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom.