Israel's occupation forces shot and killed a young man on the occupied West Bank late on Sunday March 22nd.
THE FATAL INCIDENT
Sufian Nawwaf al-Khawaja(29) was shot by Israeli occupation forces at the village of Ni'lin in the Ramallah district.
He was was mortally wounded when occupation soldiers opened fire at his car near the entrance to Ni'lin.
Sufian was left to bleed when the occupation troops stopped a Palestinian ambulance crew from reaching him, a common tactic, and instead waited for an Israeli ambulance to arrive.
Sufian al-Khawaja never reached a hospital, dying on the scene of his shooting. A final photograph shows him on a stretcher, surrounded by Israeli occupation soldiers.
ISRAELI OCCUPATION ALLEGATIONS
Israel's regime has spread quite a different narrative of the fatal incident; this was 'naturally' picked up and spread by 'Western' news agencies like the Reuters. In it Sufian was the aggressor and the occupation forces were defending illegal Israeli settlers from stone-throwers.
The occupation narrative is all about trying to justify the murder of an unarmed person by painting him as an attacker against whom his killers would have been defending themselves - but there is no evidence that this standard narrative has truth to it beyond the fact that it at least acknowledges that Israel's occupation soldiers killed Sufian.
RETALIATION BY THE OCCUPATION?
Sufian had no part in throwing stones at illegal settlers' vehicles in Palestinian press reports; he was passing through with his cousin when they were targeted by the occupation. This would be far the first time.
This fatal retaliation against bystanders by the occupation is common - and so is the deliberate 'mistaking' of pedestrian stone-throwers with persons in a car: 15-year-old Mahmoud Rafat Badran was shot and killed by Israeli occupation soldiers near Beit Sira on occupied West Bank on June 21st 2016 by Israeli occupation troops which claimed that they had made such 'a mistake'.
The village of Ni'lin is one of the centres of non-violent popular resistance against the Israeli occupation and the illegal Apartheid Wall, organizing a weekly Friday demonstration for the past decade.
This resistance makes it likely for Israeli occupation soldiers to react with random and fatal violence against stone-throwing by opening fire at an easy target like a passing driver.
Like the case of Mahmoud Badran shows, killing innocents has no negative repercussions to the occupation soldiers, which means that it has a stamp of approval from the regime itself.
SOURCES:
IOF kills Palestinian in Ramallah
https://english.palinfo.com/news/2020/3/23/IOF-kills-Palestinian-in-Ramallah
Israeli Soldiers Kill A Young Palestinian Man In Ramallah
https://imemc.org/article/israeli-soldiers-kill-a-young-palestinian-man-in-ramallah/
Palestinian killed by Israeli soldiers in West Bank village
http://english.wafa.ps/page.aspx?id=wGFYtZa115477143243awGFYtZ
Palestinian man killed by Israeli gunfire in occupied West Bank, ministry says
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/palestinian-man-killed-israeli-gunfire-occupied-west-bank-ministry-says
استشهاد شاب برصاص الاحتلال غرب رام الله
http://pnn.ps/news/499396
