An eight-year-old boy and a 15-year-old teenager died this Wednesday at the hands of the Israeli army in Jenin, a city in the northern occupied West Bank that is regularly the scene of Israeli military incursions, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported.
At the same time, the Israeli army detained a 12-year-old boy in the Jalazone refugee camp in Ramallah, reported the Prisoners’ Club, a Palestinian NGO.
In Jenin, the Ministry declared that “the two children, Adam al-Ghoul, aged eight, and Bassem Abou el-Wafa, aged 15, were killed by bullets fired by the Israeli occupiers.”
An official from the Palestinian Red Crescent told AFP that the boy and the teenager were “on a street perpendicular to the main avenue in the center of Jenin”, an area theoretically closed to the Israeli army because it is controlled solely by the Palestinian Authority.
CCTV footage posted online showed a child being shot on a street, while the bullets caused other children nearby to flee.
Other images show a teenager also hit by a bullet. As more bullets crash into the ground around her, she collapses and appears to scream for help, while five other teenagers run for cover behind cars or inside a store. The boy lay dying on the ground for at least half a minute.
Questioned by AFP, the Israeli army said it was “verifying” this information. However, he reported a nighttime raid on the Jenin refugee camp during which he “killed two high-ranking terrorists,” one of whom was wanted for two bombings that killed and wounded Israelis.
The Red Crescent reported that it had rescued six Palestinians wounded by gunshots during this raid.
Since the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, which left 1,200 dead, most of them civilians according to Israeli authorities, violence has intensified in the West Bank: nearly 240 Palestinians have died at the hands of Israeli soldiers or settlers, according to the Ministry Palestinian Health Ministry.
In Jalazone, the father of Karim Ghawanmeh, 12, told AFP that he had received a “call at night” from his brother in the presence of Israeli soldiers. “An officer said: either Karim comes now and we arrest him, or you bring him to us tomorrow morning,” Mahmoud Ghawanmeh quoted his brother as saying.
“I had no choice but to go to him in the morning, I thought I would be with him for his interrogation, but the officer told me to go home,” he continued, without specifying what his son was accused of. Also in this case, the Israeli military did not immediately want to comment.