Israeli troops kill Palestinian teen in Bethlehem
Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian teenager during a raid on the city of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank’s southern region.
On Tuesday, the Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed that 15-year-old Adam Issam Shaker Ayyad was shot and killed in the chest early that morning.
The Israeli army raided the Dheisheh refugee camp at daybreak, using dozens of armoured vehicles, and this led to violent confrontations between the soldiers and young Palestinians. Israeli forces reportedly detained several locals during the raid, as reported by the local press.
The Palestinian foreign ministry issued a statement calling the killing a “heinous crime of execution” and claiming that “Israel’s continued impunity encourages it to commit crimes against our children.”
In addition, “it is an extension of the series of extrajudicial killings and part of Israel’s targeting of Palestinian children in general,” the statement said.
The Israeli military reportedly “opened fire at a number of Palestinians who hurled Molotov cocktails at them amid the clashes, adding that suspects were hit,” as reported by Israeli media.
The Israeli military has been on a campaign of increased raids and killings for nearly a year, and Ayyad is the third Palestinian they have killed since the new year began.
Israeli forces raided the Jenin neighbourhood of Kufr Dan in the northern occupied West Bank on Monday, killing two individuals.
Since the end of the second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in 2005, the United Nations has declared that 2022 was the worst year for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
On December 29, a new Israeli government took office, and it is being called the most conservative in Israel’s 74-year history.
There are concerns that the presence of the government’s controversial individuals in positions of power over Palestinians may further inflame the situation in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu oversees.
Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority Mohammad Shtayyeh released a statement on Tuesday in which he blamed Israel for “full responsibility for all the consequences of its aggression against our cities, towns, villages, and camps, and the accompanying killings, demolitions, and arrests,” including that of Ayyad.
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education, Ayyad attended a UN-funded school in the Dheisheh camp.
In 2022, Israeli troops murdered at least 171 Palestinians in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, including more than 30 children. Over nine thousand individuals have been injured.
Palestinian fighters have been slain in targeted assassinations and armed conflicts, but so have civilians who confronted the Israeli army during raids and innocent bystanders.
Despite warnings from Palestinian armed groups in the blockaded Gaza Strip and Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem, Israel’s far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir visited the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem on Tuesday morning.
Still, Ben-Gvir was only there for 15 minutes, and it was early in the morning, so there weren’t many Palestinians around, and everything was peaceful when he departed.
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