Al-Akhbar | August 26, 2013
Plainclothes Israeli police shot dead three Palestinians during a West Bank raid early Monday, local media reported.
Ma’an news agency said that the undercover Israeli forces attempted to raid a home in the Qalandiya refugee camp around 5:00 am to rearrest a former prisoner when residents confronted them.
The occupation forces then opened fire on the residents that had surrounded them, killing 32-year Robin al-Abed, 22-year-old Younis Jahjouh and 20-year-old Jihad Aslan.
Fifteen others were wounded in the assault, six said to be in critical condition, the report added, citing medical sources. It said that most of the injured sustained bullet wounds to the head, chest and upper body.
With Monday’s killings, Israeli forces have taken the lives of 14 Palestinians in the West Bank this year, compared with three killed in the same period in 2012, according to United Nations figures.
Israeli forces last shot dead a 20-year-old Palestinian at the Jenin refugee camp on August 20. A soldier shot him directly in the heart.
The western-backed Palestinian Authority suspended the so-called peace talks with Israel over Monday’s killing.
“The meeting that was to take place in Jericho … today was cancelled because of the Israeli crime committed in Qalandiya today,” a PA official told AFP.
“What happened today in Qalandiya shows the real intentions of the Israeli government,” Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina, a separate official, told AFP as reports of the shooting started to emerge.
(Al-Akhbar, Ma’an, Reuters, AFP)