It was a tiring day and, try as I might, I can't remember what I was working on in the office all morning. I think a brochure cover. The agents of the mind-Moulinex today were three e-mail messages. One contained the Daily Press Summary of the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center, another an article from Reuters, and the final one an article from the Jerusalem Post.
These brought more details about the news I had already heard about three Palestinians who were shot near Hebron yesterday. They were travelling in a van full of nine other people, returning home at about 5:30pm after working all day inside Israel.
At a checkpoint near Tarqoumia, a Palestinian village near the edge of the border between the West Bank and Israel, Israeli soldiers opened fire on the van, killing three of the occupants and wounding another six, two critically. All last night, Adli tells me, Hebron was "on fire". The night was lit up as Molotov cocktails rained across the dividing line between Palestinians and Jewish settlers in the city.
As this took place during rush hour, it is obvious that passage through the checkpoint would have been slow. Palestinian eyewitnesses report that the yellow licence-plated van had edged past the waiting cars with West Bank plates - a common practice here - when two of the soldiers opened fire into the van without warning.
The Jerusalem Post article was an unbelievable documentary of unlikely events and usual official weaseling (italic my emphasis):
OC Judea and Samaria Brig.-Gen. Yitzhak Eitan said the soldiers opened fire after the van tried to run the roadblock and ran down a soldier. Eitan said that "soldiers who saw this opened fire at the vehicle until it came to a halt. It turned out that three Palestinians were killed and two were wounded." Palestinians identified the fatalities as Ghaleb Rajoub, a relative of West Bank Preventive Security Chief Jibril Rajoub, Mohammed Sharowna, and Adnan Abu Zneid. Eitan ordered the two soldiers who opened fire detained pending an investigation to be headed by a brigade commander at the rank of colonel.
IDF officials refused to say last night whether the soldiers had shouted out warnings or fired into the air and at the van's tires before shooting at it. "The incident is a difficult one and is under examination," he said. Asked whether soldiers had acted according to instructions, Eitan replied. "From an initial investigation it seems there was an attempt to run down a soldier and the soldiers acted accordingly. The other aspects are under investigation. The investigation will examine whether the soldiers fired at the vehicle after they saw it run down the soldier and reacted to what they saw. If they saw well or not, that is up to the the inquiry."
The IDF seem pretty cagey about this. What "other aspects" are there? The issue is not that they reacted wrongly, the issue has become whether they perceived the reason for opening fire correctly or not.
Needless to say, eyewitnesses in the same article had a different story:
A Palestinian security officer who witnessed the shooting, Lafi Ghais, disagreed with the IDF account. "The van didn't run over anybody. They entered the checkpoint as normal and then all of sudden all we heard was shooting from three automatic weapons," Ghais said.
One of the passengers, Ali Abu Zneid, said that while at the roadblock, one soldier started checking the van and then waved it onward. Abu Zneid said that another soldier standing on the other side of the roadblock asked the van to stop and then started shooting at them, and that then three more soldiers opened fire.
"We had stopped the van when they opened fire," Abu Zneid charged.
Why were only two soldiers detained if four opened fire? We certainly aren't going to find out the answer to this question.
JMCC's report quoted the following:
Ali Hasan Abu Zneid, one of the inured, said: "There were many cars waiting at the Israeli checkpoint; a Palestinian car tried to take our turn in the queue, which made our driver take a turn to block the way in front of the Palestinian car; at that moment the soldiers opened fire."
Israeli PM Netanyahu commented on the incident: "According to initial reports we received the car tried to break into the checkpoint and the Israeli soldiers acted according to instructions."
Of course it did and of course they did. "According to instructions?" What can they be: Shoot at any Arab who does anything you feel uncomfortable with? A Reuters story, also from today, was a mixture of the two different versions:
The two sides disputed the circumstances of the killings.
The Israeli army said the Palestinians veered their truck into soldiers manning the checkpoint, wounding one. Soldiers opened fire. The army detained two soldiers for questioning and appointed a committee to probe the incident.
Palestinian witnesses denied the car had tried to run over troops and said one soldier had opened fire after another had already waved the car through the checkpoint.
The Israeli army doesn't usually detain their own soldiers without good reason. This would seem to suggest that something untoward happened, and that they were the only people at the scene who told a different story from everyone else. This is simplistic, but fully in line with what happens here. Why were only two detained if four opened fire? They'll be released pretty quickly. Naturally Palestinians across the West Bank were horrified and angry. At Birzeit University, students decided to hold a demonstration at Ma'alufieyyeh.
