West Bank & Jerusalem
Settlement guard kills Palestinian teenager during unauthorised settler hike
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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A settlement security coordinator shot and killed a Palestinian teenager on the edge of Sa'ir, north-east of Hebron in the occupied West Bank, on Friday, after a group of Israeli settlers walked into the area on a hike the army says it never authorised.
The Palestinian health ministry named the youth killed as Karim Shalaldeh, seventeen. The Palestine Red Crescent Society said a man of about seventy was shot in the same incident and left in critical condition, and that its crews treated further wounded from the village.
The Israeli army said Palestinians near Sa'ir threw stones at a group of Israelis who were on a tour that had not been approved, that soldiers separated the two sides and removed the Israeli civilians, and that unapproved tours endanger those who join them and pull forces away from other duties.
The Israeli police said in a statement that local Palestinian rioters had thrown stones at the hikers inside Area B, endangering their lives, and that the security coordinator acted against a danger to Israeli lives and to protect the group.
What the police statement left out#
The news site Ynet reported that the police account omitted material parts of the incident, including the coordinator's own claim that he first fired into the air and shot only after the Palestinians did not withdraw.
By Ynet's account the statement also passed over the Palestinian claim that settlers threw an incendiary bottle and set a structure alight, and did not say whether any of the wounded Palestinians had been questioned about what happened to them.
Sa'ir sits in the hills between Hebron and Bethlehem, ringed by settlements and outposts. Under the Oslo division, Area B leaves civil affairs with the Palestinian Authority and security control with Israel — which is why an armed settlement employee was the man who opened fire on land the Authority nominally administers.
The warning that came a day earlier#
The killing landed a day after Israeli military officials warned the political leadership that the West Bank is close to a wider escalation driven by settler violence and by the spread of unauthorised outposts, according to reporting in the Israeli press.
One senior official, quoted without a name, said there is a group that wants chaos, and that support from part of the local leadership and from parts of the government makes enforcement difficult.
Overnight in the southern Hebron hills, Israeli military correspondents reported, assailants sprayed graffiti and set heavy machinery on fire; the suspects had left before troops arrived and no arrests were reported.
The pattern the Palestinian villages describe is now steady enough to name: a walk into the fields, stones thrown at the walkers, an armed man in a settlement post who arrives with legal cover to shoot, and a statement afterwards in which the dead youth appears as a rioter and the hike appears as a security incident.
