Video: Israeli sniper shoots youth during assault on refugee camp
Ali Abunimah-16 September 2016
Al-Amsi was standing on his roof talking on the telephone when the sniper shot him four times.
It was filmed by Mahmoud Abu Yousef, a videographer with the Ma’an News Agency, and published on Friday by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem as part of a report into the Israeli raid in which another youth, 19-year-old Muhammad Abu Hashhash, was shot dead by Israeli forces.
A separate B’Tselem investigation has found that Abu Hashhash was killed as he posed no danger to anyone.
Meanwhile, two Palestinians and a Jordanian citizen – one reportedly 15 years old – were shot dead by Israeli forces on Friday in separate incidents. Another Palestinian was shot dead on Saturday morning. On Thursday, a person died from wounds he received when Israeli forces shot him during a raid on his village. Last week, a Palestinian youth was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Relatives of 18-year-old Abd al-Rahman al-Dabbagh mourn during his funeral in the central Gaza Strip on 10 September. The youth was shot dead by Israeli forces the day before, during a protest near the boundary fence with Israel.APA images
Muhammad Abu Hashhash
“Where do you want it?”
In addition to the killing of Abu Hashhash, B’Tselem found that 32 Palestinians were injured during the raid on al-Fawwar refugee camp that lasted from the pre-dawn hours of 16 August until late into the evening. Israeli occupation forces searched more than 150 homes and took positions on the rooftops of dozens of them.
“During most of the intrusions into homes, the soldiers closed all family members off in a single room or section of the house for several hours,” B’Tselem reported. “Soldiers broke windows, doors and walls and damaged property in 28 of the homes they invaded.”
The Israeli raid was allegedly meant to search for individuals wanted for questioning and to look for weapons. Three Palestinians were detained and two guns were found.
But the massive scale and lethal brutality of the assault raised suspicions among camp residents that they were actually being used as live guinea pigs for a training exercise.
One of the homes Israeli forces occupied was in Muhammad al-Amsi’s neighborhood. A sniper and a lookout took positions on one of the top balconies. Al-Amsi was standing on the roof of his own house, talking on a mobile phone when, he says, the sniper on the adjacent house shouted at him, “Where do you want it?”
“I took that to mean what part of my body I wanted him to aim the bullet at,” al-Amsi told B’Tselem’s field researcher. “I retreated a little, and sat down cross legged, but I felt that I’d been hit in the left leg, in the calf under the knee, and I heard a gunshot, not very loud. A few seconds later, I heard another shot and felt another hit in the same leg, this time in the thigh. A few more seconds after that, I was hit by another bullet in the right thigh.”
“I crawled from the corner I was in for a few meters, and shouted to the soldier. I asked him to stop shooting,” al-Amsi recalled. “Stop … Enough … Enough.”
But the soldier shot another bullet that hit the phone al-Amsi was holding, penetrating his hand.
Eyewitnesses and the video corroborate al-Amsi’s account, according to B’Tselem. Al-Amsi suffered severe injuries that required surgery on both of his legs. The severity of the wounds required him to be transferred to the Ramallah Medical Center, where he remained for 10 days.
His shooting is reminiscent of a pattern of deliberate woundings by Israeli occupation forces of Palestinian youths elsewhere in the West Bank, apparently intended to cause severe injuries or permanent disabilities.
