Israel: The killing of four Palestinians in March in Nablus was avoidable

Israel: The killing of four Palestinians in March in Nablus was avoidable

Israel said that the incident of killing four Palestinians last month in the village of Irak Burin and Awarta, south of Nablus, resulted from avoidable mistakes committed by its troops.

The Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported on Tuesday that Israeli soldiers told their commanders that they used rubber bullets, but Palestinian medical sources said that the four victims were killed by live ammunition.

The newspaper said that Israel carried out an investigation into the incident which proved the use of live bullets and would inform the Palestinian Authority (PA) about the probe results.

The Israeli occupation forces (IOF) killed in cold blood last month four Palestinian young men, where they tied Mohamed Qadous and Oseid Qadous from Awarta and shot them in their heads, and opened fire randomly at a protest in Irak Burin which led to the death of two others.

In another context, the Israeli occupation authority (IOA) decided to lift the security cordon that had been imposed on occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank for more than a week on the occasion of the Jewish Passover.

The Hebrew radio reported the cordon will be lifted on Tuesday evening.

In separate incidents, the people of Qaryut village, south of Nablus, participated on Monday in a voluntary day to help the village farmers cultivate their agricultural lands which are threatened with confiscation by Israeli settlers.

Palestinian eyewitnesses said that as the volunteers were planting trees, a group of Israeli settlers and settlement guards gathered in the area and tried to prevent them from working the lands, but the volunteers confronted the settlers and refused to leave.

The village of Qaryut lost thousands of dunums of its lands after they were appropriated by Israeli settlers and turned into settlements. The villagers also suffer from the terrorist acts of settlers who attack farmers and block them from working their lands.

On the evening of the same day, the IOF troops kidnapped Mohamed Jaradat, the former representative of the Islamic student bloc at Al-Najah university in Nablus, as he was on his way back from Ramallah to Jenin after they set up a temporary checkpoint for him.

Jaradat was recently released from Mahmoud Abbas’s jails, where he spent more than six months in Juneid prison in Nablus.

The IOF troops also raided the village of Beit Fajar near Bethlehem on Monday evening and erected temporary barriers.

Sources from the village reported that the troops stormed a number of homes and forced many young men to stay in the open with their hands up and their faces against the wall.

Before their withdrawal from the village, the sources said, the troops took with them three Palestinian young men, blindfolded and handcuffed, to an unknown destination