Israeli Press
Ofarim's guard fired at a Palestinian whom Israel then called a thief
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The Home Front Command app warned residents of the settlement of Ofarim, north-west of Ramallah, of a feared attacker inside their gates on Saturday morning. Families locked their doors. "Nobody told us anything," one resident told the Israeli daily Maariv while the alert was still running.
What the army described afterwards was narrower. Security forces were chasing a suspicious vehicle in the area, the IDF spokesperson said, the vehicle broke through the settlement's checkpoint, and when the driver got out a security officer on the scene "carried out a suspect-arrest procedure that included firing at him."
The man was arrested and handed to the Samaria police district, the spokesperson said, adding that the incident had ended and there was no security concern. None of the Israeli reports mentioned an injury, and none said whether the shots hit him.
Within half an hour the classification changed. Maariv reported that the man in custody was a car thief and a resident of the occupied territories, and that suspicion of an attack had been ruled out. The Jerusalem Post carried the same correction: warning lifted, suspected car thief in custody.
The sequence is the ordinary arithmetic of the occupied West Bank. A Palestinian driving away from a checkpoint sets off an infiltration alarm, live fire follows before any identification, and the correction arrives after the shooting rather than before it. The alert was withdrawn. The rounds had already been fired.
