Hundreds of mourners reportedly gathered for Dawabsheh’s funeral Saturday afternoon and Israeli Defense Forces were positioned along the route of the funeral procession, to prevent any violence breaking out.
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Saad Dawabsha, the father of the family whose West Bank home was torched last week – a fatal attack which killed his toddler son – succumbed to his wounds early Saturday morning at the Soroka Hospital in Israel.
Saad Dawabsha, 32, died in an Israeli hospital where he was being treated for second-degree burns to most of his body.
Ahmed Dawabshe died from injuries a week after extremist settlers firebombed his house in the village of Duma. “Our thoughts and prayers go out for the recovery of his four year-old son, Ahmed, and his wife, Riham, who is also fighting for her life”, Nickolay Mladenov, UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process and Personal Representative of the Secretary-General to the PLO and the Palestinian Authority said in a statement on Saturday.
He ordered a crackdown on Jewish extremism that has seen three suspects detained. “The only way to stop this is to tell Israel and Netanyahu’s government they will be punished for similar crimes if they are committed again”.
Israel now applies administrative detention exclusively to Palestinians and its extension to Israelis reflects the government’s frustration at the failure to track down the assailants.
A spokeswoman for Israeli police, Luba Samri, said after the Duma attack that authorities found the words “price tag” written on the walls of the family’s home.
He said that the PA Foreign Ministry has instructed all its embassies to “expose Israeli violations against our people, especially continued settler attacks and terrorism”.
“Since [Saad’s] transfer to hospital, he wasn’t responding to treatment”, said Ibrahim, adding that the “entire village” had travelled to Nablus to bring Saad’s body back to Duma. The Palestinians on Monday submitted a request to the ICC to probe the firebombing and settler terrorism.
Following Saad’s death on Saturday, Hamas spokesman Hossam Badran called for “open and comprehensive confrontation against the [Israeli] occupation”.
“Political, community and religious leaders on all sides should work together and not allow extremists to escalate the situation and take control of the political agenda”.
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The security cabinet would seek to advance legislation that would fight terrorist acts of Jewish extremists and establish a ministerial committee to be headed by Defensce Minister Moshe Yaalon in order to come up with solutions to prevent such attacks from happening in the future.
