Middle East Eye / November 5, 2022
The 18-year-old was killed by multiple ‘severe’ gunshot wounds, says local Palestinian Health Ministry.
Israeli forces fatally shot an 18-year-old Palestinian on Saturday near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.
Musaab Nafal died “from severe wounds sustained by occupation (Israeli) bullets near the village of Sinjil”, the ministry said in a statement.
The Israeli army said soldiers responded to “a report about stone hurling toward a highway” that had caused damage “to a number of cars”.
Soldiers “responded with fire toward the perpetrators. Hits were identified,” it said in a statement.
The incident came four days after Israelis went to the polls for general elections.
Violence has soared between Israel and the Palestinians in recent months, with Israeli forces making near-daily raids into the occupied West Bank.
Israeli forces killed at least 29 Palestinians in the West Bank last month, making October the deadliest month there so far in what the United Nations’ humanitarian office said on Tuesday was on course to be the “deadliest year” since it started counting fatalities across the Palestinian territories in 2005.
On Thursday, Israeli forces killed four Palestinians, including a 14-year-old boy, in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967.
About 475,000 Jewish settlers currently live in the West Bank [excluding East Jerusalem] in Jewish-only communities considered illegal by most of the international community, alongside some 2.9 million Palestinians.
On Friday, Israeli fighter jets targeted what the Israeli army claimed was a rocket manufacturing site in the Gaza Strip, in the first such bombing since Israel’s offensive against the besieged enclave in August.