Undercover Israeli agents pretending to transport a pregnant woman have raided a West Bank hospital overnight and killed a Palestinian while arresting his cousin over a knife attack, officials say.
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“This is a discriminatory policy”, Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s energy minister, said this week before the announcement.
Palestinian officials and the family identified the victim as Shalaldeh’s cousin, 27-year-old Abdallah Azzam Shalaldeh.
About two minutes later, they were seen pushing a man in a wheelchair, presumably the suspect, back down the hallway.
“They held the staff at gunpoint and stormed the room of Shalalda”, Shawar said.
It alleged the suspect they arrested was behind an October 25 stabbing that wounded an Israeli near the Mezad settlement around Hebron.
“The arrest of a Palestinian injured patient who is receiving a medical treatment and kidnapping him to an unknown location also is a grave violation to the global law and the human rights law”, the ministry added.
“The fact that Abdullah Shalaldah was shot in the head and upper body suggests this was an extrajudicial execution”, the organisation’s Middle East director Philip Luther said. “How can I convince people there is an authority here that can protect them?” he told The National.
‘My cousin was in the bathroom and when he opened the bathroom door, and without any warning or any words, they shot at him five times’.
The worldwide Committee of the Red Cross said it was “following up very closely” the events at the Hebron hospital and was pursuing the matter with Israeli security services.
The military says that over the past month, Palestinians have carried out dozens of attacks in Hebron alone, including more than 20 stabbings, multiple assaults with cars and other vehicles and several shooting attacks. Seventy-nine Palestinians have been killed, including 50 who Israel says were involved in attacks.
The author of an upcoming book on the undercover agents said they undergo months of training, often come from Arabic-speaking minorities in Israel and immerse themselves in the “local terrain”, intimately learning the habits and movements of their targets.
It was reminiscent of a similar incident in October, when Palestinians shot and killed an Israeli couple in front of their four children, including a 4-months-old infant, as the family was driving in the West Bank.
The raid occurred in Hebron, a volatile city in the southern West Bank that has been a frequent flashpoint of violence during weeks of Israel-Palestinian unrest.
In the Jordan Valley, 900 farms earn $200 million a year, mainly from exports of dates and other produce, and employ 6,000 Palestinians.
Before the crackdown, there was a weekly average of 78 Israeli army “search and arrest operations” carried out across the occupied West Bank in 2015, according to United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, however there has recently been a sharp increase in such operations.
Much of the Old City has become a ghost town, with only residents allowed in.
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There is now only one route out of Hebron, and soldiers search each vehicle and check the identities of those inside as traffic backs up.
