Palestinian teenager shot dead in Israeli troops’ West Bank raid
burqin (west bank) — Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian teenager during an arrest raid in the village of Burqin in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian health officials said on Saturday.
A witness said about 200 Palestinians were throwing stones at Israeli military vehicles when a gunshot was heard, adding that a wounded person was then carried to a car.
Israel’s military said its forces had been searching in Burqin for suspects involved in the fatal driveby shooting of an Israeli rabbi from a nearby settlement on January 9.
A military spokeswoman said rioting had broken out while troops were apprehending several suspects connected with that shooting and troops responded with nonfatal “riot dispersal means” against Palestinians throwing rocks and firebombs and then with live gunfire at the main instigators.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said the teenager killed on Saturday was 19 years old, while the hospital in Jenin where he was taken said he had been shot in the head.
The Israeli military spokeswoman claimed he had climbed onto a military vehicle and had opened its door before he was shot.
Israeli forces in the adjacent city of Jenin last month shot and killed a Palestinian whom they had also suspected of involvement in the rabbi’s shooting.
Meanwhile, Israel’s radical prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said ministers would grant formal authorisation to a rogue West Bank settlement in response to the murder last month of a rabbi who lived there.
Israeli settlements are seen as illegal under international law and major obstacles to peace as they are built on land the Palestinians see as part of their future state.
But Israel differentiates between settlements it has approved and those it has not.
Those without approval are referred to as outposts and tend to be populated by hardline religious nationalists who see the entire West Bank as part of Israel.
“The government will regularise the status of Havat Gilad to allow the continuance of normal life there,” he said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting, referring to the wildcat settlement in the occupied West Bank.
The official cabinet agenda says ministers will hear a motion to designate the 15-year-old outpost as a “new community” which will have the necessary building permits and a state budget. Some 50 families live in the outpost.
Rabbi Raziel Shevah was shot dead near Havat Gilad, where he lived, on January 9.
The following week, Israeli troops searching for his attackers shot dead what they described as a Palestinian suspect in the city of Jenin in the northern West Bank, about 35km north of Havat Gilad.
They did not, however, catch the man considered to have led the attack on Shevah, 22-year-old Ahmed Jarrar. At Shevah’s funeral, there were calls for “revenge” during a speech by Education Minister Naftali Bennett of the far-right Jewish Home party.
Bennett responded by saying that the only revenge should be in building more settlements, and Netanyahu said on Sunday that was one of the planks of his policy. —