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Soldiers
Kill, Wound Farmers, Demonstrators, Journalists
APRIL 25, 2014
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Palestinians carry the body of 16-year-old Adnan Abu
Khater, who, according to Palestinian medics, was shot by Israeli troops near
the border with Israel, during his funeral in the Gaza Strip on January 3,
2014.
© 2014 Reuters
Enlarge
Bilal Oweidah, 19, was taking photographs of deer with
friends when he was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers near the perimeter
fence in the Gaza Strip.
Photo courtesy of the Oweidah family
Enlarge
Amina Qdeih, a 58-year-old woman with an intellectual
disability, was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers on February 28, 2014, after
getting lost walking home from a wedding party near the perimeter fence in the
Gaza Strip.
Photo courtesy of the Qdeih family
Enlarge
Ibrahim Mansour, 35, was shot in the head and killed by
Israeli soldiers on February 13, 2014, while he and others collected rubble for
building materials near the perimeter fence in the Gaza Strip.
Photo courtesy
of the Mansour family
Month after month, Israeli forces have wounded and killed unarmed
Palestinians who did nothing but cross an invisible, shifting line that Israel
has drawn inside Gaza’s perimeter. It’s appalling that soldiers have shot men,
women, and children apparently for simply crossing a line.
Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director
(Jerusalem)
– The Israeli military should immediately stop shooting at Palestinian
civilians inside Gaza. Israeli military forces have killed 4 and wounded more
than 60 civilians near the perimeter fence with Gaza since the beginning of
2014, according to UN figures. There have been no reports of armed Palestinian
fighters shot in the same areas this year.
Human Rights Watch investigated
seven incidents between January 2 and March 1, in which Israeli forces shot
civilians in the vicinity of the fence. Four were killed, including a high
school student on a picnic and a woman with an intellectual disability who was
lost. Five others were wounded, including two journalists and two demonstrators
planting olive trees, none of whom posed a threat to the soldiers or others.
The Israeli military has not claimed that any of the victims in the seven cases
were engaged in military operations or that armed groups were in the area when
the shooting occurred.
“Month after month, Israeli forces have wounded and
killed unarmed Palestinians who did nothing but cross an invisible, shifting
line that Israel has drawn inside Gaza’s perimeter,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “It’s appalling that
soldiers have shot men, women, and children apparently for simply crossing a
line.”
The Israeli military has issued directives prohibiting any Palestinian
presence on land within Gaza abutting the territory’s perimeter fence,
currently up to 300 meters from the fence, but Israeli forces have frequently shot
at Palestinians beyond that distance. The United Nations Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that Israeli forces’ use of live
ammunition has placed up to 35 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land off-limits
to farmers. Palestinians living in the densely inhabited Gaza Strip use land
near the fence with Israel for agriculture, collecting rubble, scrap metal, and
other reusable materials, and recreation.
In areas near the Gaza perimeter,
Israeli forceskilled 5 Palestinian civilians and wounded 60 others in 2013,
according to the UN Office of the HighCommissioner for Human Rights. So far in
2014, Israeli forces have killed 4 civilians and wounded more than 60 in those
areas, mostly protesters demonstrating against Israel’s restrictions on access
to farmland near the perimeter fence.
In situations in which military forces
are playing a policing or law-enforcement role, international human rights law
applies; in such circumstances, lethal force may only be used when strictly
necessary to prevent an imminent threat to life. Israeli soldiers do not face
an imminent lethal threat from unarmed Palestinian civilians in areas of Gaza
near the perimeter fence.
In violation of international humanitarian law (or
the laws of war) which prohibits attacks on civilians, Israeli soldiers have
repeatedly shot at civilians near the fence on the Palestinian side.
Under the
laws of war, attacks may only be directed at military objectives, such as enemy
combatants. Forces must do everything feasible to verify that targets are
military objectives, and if there is doubt, must cancel the attack. While
civilians who take a direct part in hostilities are subject to attack, merely
entering a prohibited area does not meet that requirement. Military personnel who
willfully kill civilians are committing a war crime.
On February 28, Israeli
soldiers shot Amina Qdeih, a 58-year-old woman with an intellectual disability,
who got lost while walking home from a wedding party. Her relatives heard
shooting near the perimeter fence late at night, but because of fears of attack
by Israeli drones overhead, they did not find her body until 6 a.m. the next
morning. A hospital report said she had a gunshot wound to her abdomen and died
of blood loss.
On February 13, Israeli forces fatally shot 35-year-old Ibrahim
Mansour in the head while he and others collected rubble for building material
several hundred meters from the perimeter fence. A witness told Human Rights
Watch that an Israeli military vehicle fired teargas at four apparently unarmed
men, who then fled. When Mansour and others who had taken cover resumed
working, Israeli forces fired at them with live ammunition, killing Mansour and
wounding another worker as they tried to run away.
Israeli forces shot and
killed Bilal Oweidah, 19, on January 24, near the perimeter fence when he was
taking photographs of deer while on an outing with friends. On January 2,
Israeli forces shot and killed Adnan Abu Khater, 16, while he was picnicking
about 600 meters from the fence with a group of high school friends to
celebrate finishing their exams. Witnesses in both cases told Human Rights
Watch that all the men and students were unarmed.
In other cases, Israeli
forces shot and wounded Palestinian civilians taking part in protests inside
Gaza against Israeli restrictions on Palestinian access to farmland near the
perimeter, and journalists covering the protests. On February 25, Israeli
forces wounded Nasser Rahman, a 24-year-old journalist covering a
demonstration, hitting him in the kneecap. On January 17, Israeli forces shot
and wounded two Palestinian men attempting to plant olive trees, and a
journalist, during a protest near the fence. The three men told Human Rights
Watch that some young people at the demonstration threw stones toward Israeli
forces but that they were not near the stone throwers at the time.
After a
truce in November 2012, the Israeli military stated that it would allow
Palestinians to approach up to 100 meters of the perimeter. But in April 2013,
an Israeli military spokesperson responded to a freedom of information request
from Gisha, an Israeli rights group, saying that the no-go area extended to 300
meters from the fence. In the past several years, Israeli forces have often
fired at Palestinians at greater distances.
From 2005 through 2013, the
Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), a nongovernmental group,
submitted about two dozen complaints to the Israeli military asking officials
to conduct criminal investigations into alleged killings and injuries in areas
near Gaza’s land perimeter. The Israeli navy also imposes a blockade and limits
Gazan boats to traveling no more than six nautical miles from shore.
The
military has not opened any criminal investigations into their complaints, PCHR
reported. As of December 31, “responses received from the [military] stated
that the cases were closed because the victim had violated the access
restrictions, or because the use of lethal force by the Israeli military was
within its rules of engagement,” the UN Office of the High Commissioner for
Human Rights reported.
Palestinian armed groups in Gaza have frequently
launched rockets into Israel from areas near the perimeter fence – when
directed at Israeli population centers, such attacks violate the laws of war
prohibition against indiscriminate attacks. Israeli forces say they have
discovered tunnels that armed Palestinian groups constructed from Gaza into
Israel.
In February 2014, an Israeli military spokesperson told Ma’an News,
a Palestinian news website, that Palestinian armed groups had detonated three
explosive devices near Israeli soldiers patrolling the security fence since the
beginning of the year; no one was injured. In December, members of a
Palestinian armed group shot and killed an Israeli civilian contractor with the
Israeli military while he was repairing the perimeter fence.
The Israeli
security rationale of using lethal force to prevent Palestinian armed groups
from engaging in military operations near the perimeter does not justify shooting
civilians who are not taking active part in the hostilities, Human Rights Watch
said. Many have been farmers on their land. The UN Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights reported that in December 2013 Israeli forces
opened fire 20 times from a watchtower on farmers from Beit Hanoun, in the
northern Gaza Strip, as they tried to reach their agricultural lands. In the
second half of 2013, Israeli forces shot and wounded six farmers while they
were working at distances further than 300 meters from the perimeter fence, the
UN office said.
The economy of the Gaza Strip has been severely harmed by
Israel’s and Egypt’s border closures, with unemployment at almost 40 percent
and more than 70 percent of the population receiving humanitarian assistance. Apart
from the deaths and injuries, the practice of firing shots, including warning
shots, at Gaza residents who approach the perimeter has deprived farmers of
access to their agricultural lands, harming livelihoods.
Israeli
military spokespeople and Palestinian witnesses both say that Israeli forces
often fire warning shots in the air and then fire at the legs of people in Gaza
near the perimeter fence before shooting to kill. While firing warning shots
may reduce the likelihood of shooting a civilian, a failure to heed warning
shots does not turn a civilian into a lawful military target. Civilians may not
be targeted, even by shooting to wound. While law enforcement rules encourage
warning shots and non-lethal use of force, it must be in proportion to the
imminent risk faced.
“Shooting at civilians is not a lawful policy near Gaza’s
perimeter fence or anywhere else,” Whitson said. “Israeli commanders need to
change their policies and practices to abide by international law, not flaunt
it.”
For more information on Israeli shootings near the perimeter fence
with Gaza, please see below.
Gaza Perimeter Shooting Incidents
Fatalities
Amina
Qdeih
Amina Qdeih, about 58, whose family said she had an intellectual
disability and had difficulty speaking, lived in Khuza’a, a town close to the
Israeli perimeter fence in southeastern Gaza, east of Khan Yunis. On February
28, 2014, she and her relatives attended a cousin’s wedding party about 500
meters from home. “She left the wedding by herself, and must have got confused
and lost,” her brother Mahmud, 63, told Human Rights Watch. “About two years
ago she walked into town but people brought her back to us, but this was the
first time she walked toward the fence.”
Her brother said that he became
worried when it was getting late and she had not returned home. He and other
family members alerted residents of Khuza’a that she was missing. “Then we
heard shots fired, around 10 shots or maybe more, in a row. I wasn’t
hopeful.”
Qdeih’s nephew, Ismail, told Human Rights Watch that about an
hour after the family heard the gunfire, he got a phone call from someone who
said he had seen a woman walking toward the fence, who might have been Qdeih,
and that shots were fired and she might have been hit:
Then the [Palestinian] Red
Crescent [ambulance] arrived and we could hear that they were calling on the
radio to get coordination [with Israel for permission] to search the area.
Eventually they searched and we joined the search, until around 2 a.m., but
then we heard [Israeli] drones overhead and decided to leave. We took it as a
warning [of a potential airstrike]. The next morning, at 6 a.m., a few of us
went out and retraced the tracks of the ambulance, and got as close as we could
to the fence. We found her [body] and brought her out.
Qdeih’s
body was found near a small barbed-wire fence 30 meters on the Gaza side of the
larger Israeli military perimeter fence, residents said.
Ma’an
News reported
that an Israeli army spokesperson confirmed that ”Israeli forces fired toward
the lower extremities” of a person who approached the border fence east of Khan
Younis on the night of February 28, after ordering the suspect to stop and
firing warning shots into the air.
“She bled to death while we were searching
for her,” her nephew said. A death certificate from a Gaza hospital, dated
March 1, states that Qdeih, born in 1956, died from “bleeding due to a vein
ruptured in her abdomen by one bullet.”
Residents of Khuza’a said that Israeli
forces often fired at people who approached closer than 500 meters to the
perimeter fence. “We are afraid to get even that close, though, because they
will shoot at distances beyond 500 meters,” Ismail Qdeih said.
Ibrahim
Mansour
Israeli forces shot Ibrahim Mansour, 35, on February 13,
when he was at least 200 meters from the Israeli perimeter fence in a former
industrial area in the Homra neighborhood of Shajai’ya, east of Gaza City.
Mansour’s family said he had been working each day for two months in the area,
where he and other workers collected rubble and loaded it onto donkey carts to
sell as building material.
“The money Ibrahim made from collecting rubble was
his only income, enough to pay for our food,” his wife, Reem, 36, told Human
Rights Watch. Mansour is survived by Reem and their seven children, ages 2
through 11. She and other family members had been to the area to cultivate land
they rented, she said. “The Israeli soldiers know we’re there,” she said.
“Sometimes the soldiers would drive by,” on a perimeter road on the other side
of the fence, “and the workers run away and hide, then return later.”Mansour’s
cousin Mohannad Mansour said. “The last time when the soldiers fired and the
workers took it as a warning, was in late January. They would always leave
before dusk anyway, to avoid suspicion. Usually if the soldiers did anything,
it was firing teargas.”
There were scores of men working in the area, as
usual, on the day soldiers shot Mansour,Rafeeq Khorkli, 21, a worker, told
Human Rights Watch. Khorkli said he had been working in the area for six weeks
because there were no other jobs: “[Israeli military vehicles] would sometimes
drive by and shoot a warning shot or fire teargas, but then leave.”
Khorkli said that on February 13 at about 2:30 p.m. he saw four unarmed men in
their mid-20s, who were not workers, approach the fence:
That’s when the [Israeli miltary
vehicle] arrived. The [four] guys left, and we thought the army had left too,
and so we returned to work. Ibrahim was behind me, and my brother was in front
of us, closer to the fence. There were shots around our feet, and I turned to
run, and I got shot in the leg, but it was not a bad wound. That’s when
Ibrahim was hit. When I got hit, I turned around to look for Ibrahim and didn’t
see him, but I thought he had hidden. My brother saw him. We turned him over
and there was blood on the ground. He was far away from the fence, a few
hundred meters. I called my dad, and the ambulance. My dad sent two cars for
us, and we drove and met up with the ambulance. He died in al-Shifa [hospital,
in Gaza City].
An
Israeli military spokesperson said that soldiers fired on the “main instigator”
of a group of men who had approached and tampered with the perimeter fence,
after first using other unspecified means to disperse them, according to a Ma’an
News report on February 13.
A hospital autopsy report conducted on
the date of his death stated that Mansour’s head had a serrated bullet entry
wound, brain tissue damage, and multiple fractures of the skull at the bullet’s
exit point.
In a similar incident, the Israeli rights group B’Tselem reported
that Israeli forces shot `Odeh Hamad in the head at about 3:20 p.m. on December
20, 2013, while he was working with his brother at the Beit Hanoun garbage
dump, near the perimeter fence, to collect scraps of plastic and metal for
resale. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that
Hamad was within 100 meters of the fence, on open ground, at the time.
Adnan
Abu Khater
Israeli forces shot Adnan Abu Khater, 16, on January 2 near
the perimeter fence east of Jabalia, in the Masaha area, where he and nine
classmates from his secondary school went on a picnic after finishing their
exams. One of the students, Abu Khater’s cousin Muhammad, 17, told Human Rights
Watch that they chose to go “for a trip there, because there is nice scenery.
We brought some food: falafel, avocados, and eggs.” The shooting occurred about
11:30 a.m.:
We were on a hill, hundreds of
meters away from the fence. We weren’t throwing stones or anything, and there
were no “jeeps” [a common term for military Hummers] or drones in the area. A
[military] Hummer drove up to the fence, a soldier stepped out, and shot at us.
He shot four times. I knew he was shooting at us because the sand flew up
around us. We hid behind the hill. The Hummer left, the shooting stopped, and
we broke up into smaller groups and started to leave. I was walking in front.
Adnan was in a group with two others, behind me, when he was shot.
Ayman
Abu Sido, a truck driver who was delivering cooking gas tanks to homes in the
area, told Human Rights Watch that he was sitting down to eat lunch nearby when
Abu Khater was shot:
I had arrived before the kids did.
Kids often go to that area for fun, but we heard the shots and we took it as a
warning. After the [Israeli military] jeep left, they were leaving too – we all
were starting to leave. Adnan was walking last in the group, and then he was
shot.
Muhammad
Abu Khater said that he and one of their classmates went back and dragged his
cousin for several hundred meters further away from the fence, “moving in a
zig-zag because they kept shooting at us.” Muhammad said Adnan, shot above the
hip, was bleeding. “It took a long time for the ambulance to arrive,” he said.
“They tried to remove the bullet immediately but one of the doctors said it had
fragmented and wounded his pelvis, stomach, and colon.”
The ambulance arrived
at Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahiya at about 12:30 p.m., and from there Abu
Khater was transferred to al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, his family said.
After operating on him, doctors obtained Israeli military approval to transfer
Abu Khater to an Israeli hospital via the Erez border crossing, his family
said. His mother, Um Muhammad, told Human Rights Watch:
He needed 18 blood bags during the
operation, the bullet had severed an artery and [damaged] his colon. The doctor
said we needed to send him to an Israeli hospital and I was chosen to go with
him. We left in an ambulance with a doctor and a nurse. At the [Erez] crossing
they moved him onto a stretcher and an open flatbed jeep, with a man from the
Red Cross holding his IV [drip]. The guards searched me and Adnan was taken to
a clinic. Fifteen minutes later they told me he was in an operation, and then
another 15 and they told me he was dead.
According
to a medical report from al-Shifa hospital, Abu Khater was dead on arrival when
he was returned from Erez at 5 a.m. on January 3, from a gunshot wound. A death
certificate, dated January 6, states that he died as a result of a ruptured
vein in the abdomen, due to a bullet that also damaged his pelvis.
Bilal
Oweidah
Bilal Oweidah, 20, an unemployed carpenter, went to property
owned by a relative near the Gaza perimeter fence north of Beit Lahia at about
3 p.m. on January 24, along with a family friend and his cousin, Akram Oweidah,
21. Akram told Human Rights Watch that the friends “usually go there
every other Friday. It’s a beautiful area, and comparatively calm, unlike some
other places” near the perimeter where Palestinians occasionally hold protests.
The group rarely approached the perimeter fence because ”there are usually
[Israeli military] patrols in the area, tanks, or jeeps,” he said. “But this
time it was empty.We did not see any forces.”
He said that when he and Bilal
arrived in the area, they saw four Palestinians about seven meters from
the perimeter fence on the Gaza side, taking photographs of deer on the Israeli
side of the fence:
We saw the deer and Bilal called
to me to come closer and take pictures with him. We weren’t carrying anything,
just our cell phones that we took pictures with. Bilal, I, and our friend,
Nour, walked down toward the fence where the other four people were, and
nothing happened. Suddenly we heard a shot, and all of us ran. I ran with
Bilal, for maybe five meters, and then he called out, “I’m hit!” I said, “Are
you joking?” and then saw him start falling over, slowly. I went back and
turned him over. His chest and the ground were bloody. It was one shot to the
chest, he had no other injuries. He blinked twice, three times, and his soul
left him. It must have been a sniper, someone shooting from far away, because
we didn’t see any soldiers.
Witnesses
told Human Rights Watch that there were no Palestinian armed groups in the
area, and the bullets appeared to have been fired from the Israeli side of the
fence. Bilal Oweidahwas shot at about 3:45 p.m., Akram Oweidahsaid. Akram and
two others carried Bilal away from the border area to a car and drove him to a
hospital. A medical report from Kamal Odwan hospital states that Bilal Oweidah
was dead on arrival from a bullet entry wound to the chest, with no exit
wound.
The Israeli military did not comment on the shooting of Oweidah. In a
separate incident on January 24, the military said its forces shot at two
Palestinians protesting near the perimeter fence north of Jabalia, a different
area in northern Gaza, according to news reports.
Injuries
Nasser
Rahman
Nasser Rahman, 24, a journalist and photographer, told Human
Rights Watch that Israeli forces shot him on February 25 while he was covering
a demonstration, organized by a group called Intifada Youth to commemorate the
20th anniversary of the killing by an Israeli settler of 29 Palestinians in
Hebron in 1994. The demonstration began at around 1 p.m. in an area near Nahal
Oz, a former crossing point in the Israeli perimeter fence for imports and
exports, which Israel has closed. Rahman said he was about 50 or 60 meters away
from the fence when soldiers shot him, at about 1:30 p.m.:
I was there to take photos of the
event. I didn’t have a flak jacket with ”PRESS” markings, but I had my camera,
so it was obvious that I was not throwing anything. I had deliberately
positioned myself on the side of the group, away from the stone throwing, so as
not to be shot. A soldier had left his [military vehicle], and I saw him take
aim at a group of youths.
Rahman
said he was holding a small mirror and tried to shine light at the soldier’s
eyes to distract him and prevent him from shooting at the group:
I saw him look at me. He must have
thought I was taunting him, and he shot. There was no warning shot, no
gas canister, no rubber bullet. A first shot missed me, and then just seconds
later a bullet hit me in the knee. I didn’t have time to run, but I had started
to turn around to run away, so the second bullet hit my knee from the side, not
straight on. I fell down, and as the others tried to reach me, [the soldiers]
started shooting a lot of [tear] gas canisters toward us. One of the canisters
landed near my head. Finally two guys came and carried me away. I was taken to
the Wafa hospital and immediately transferred in an ambulance to al-Shifa
[hospital, in Gaza City].
Rahman,
who was wearing a cast when Human Rights Watch spoke with him on March 24, said
the bullet caused a 5-centimeter-wide exit wound.
Moaz Abu Ghbeit
On
the afternoon of January 24, several dozen Palestinian men and children
participated in a protest against Israeli restrictions on access to land close
to the perimeter fence in an area east of a cemetery outside Jabalya, in the
northern Gaza Strip. An Israeli military spokesperson’s statement and
Palestinian witnesses said that protesters threw rocks at Israeli soldiers on
the other side. The Israeli military spokesperson told Ma’an News that
Israeli forces fired warning shots in the air before shooting “toward the main
two instigators.”
Moaz Abu Ghbeit, 18, said he was not near the perimeter
fence when Israeli forces shot him. Abu Ghbeit told Human Rights Watch that,
being unemployed, he was “bored and decided to go see the protest” that
afternoon:
There were some guys who were
right next to the fence, but I was standing on a hill at least 200 meters away with
some of my friends. I wasn’t carrying anything. We didn’t see any soldiers, so
I don’t know who shot me, maybe a sniper or a gun in a watchtower. There were
no obstructions. It was open ground, so they could see me.
The
bullet entered Abu Ghbeit’s right knee and exited through his hip, causing a
five-centimeter-wide exit wound and nerve damage. “I fainted and woke up
in the hospital,” he said. “I had lost lots of blood. The doctor said part of
the bullet had fragmented inside me. I was operated on for nerve damage and was
in the hospital for nine days.” He said he would need a second operation to
remove the other fragments.
The Palestinian rights group al-Mezan reported
that during the incident, Israeli forces also injured four men with
rubber-coated metal bullets, and that doctors treated a 22-year-old man and a
17-year-old boy for teargas inhalation.
Majed Abu Salama, Hammad Ashour,
and Khaled al-Sabbah
On the afternoon of January 19, Israeli forces
shot and wounded three Gaza residents near the perimeter fence east of Gaza
City during a protest against the Israeli military’s perimeter fence policies.
The three men were part of a group of several hundred people who met at 12:30
p.m. in the Shaja’iya neighborhood and walked east, past the neighborhood
police station, toward the former Nahal Oz crossing-point in the perimeter
fence.
At about 3 p.m., Israeli forces shot Majed Abu Salama, a youth activist
who had helped organize the demonstration. He told Human Rights Watch:
We had brought more than 100 small
olive trees with us, one per person, to plant on the land. The land there
belongs to Ismail al-Arayir, a farmer, who gave us permission to plant on it,
since he can’t access it due to the [Israeli] army. We planted about 50 of the
olive trees when I was shot. I was the first to be shot, in my right lower leg,
when I was about 100 meters from the fence. I went to plant an olive tree and
they planted a bullet in my leg. People carried me away and I went to the
hospital.
The
three men, interviewed separately, said that the demonstration posed no threat
to Israeli forces. “Some guys managed to put the Palestinian flag on the fence,
and there were a few kids throwing stones at the fence but they were far away
from us, maybe 150 meters, when we were shot,” Abu Salama said.
Hammad Ashour,
21, a student at al-Azhar University in Gaza City, said that Israeli forces
shot him soon after Abu Salama was shot:
We didn’t expect live fire, at
most we thought there would be teargas, but even that – there was so much more
gas than we expected. We stopped walking toward the fence when they started
firing [teargas], and then there was a pause, so we moved forward again, and
they started shooting [live ammunition]. The bullets were striking by our feet.
I was about 100 meters from the fence when I heard someone had been shot. It
was Majed [Abu Salama]. I turned around to look, and then I was shot and I fell
in a hole. People picked me up and carried me for about 400 meters to a tuk-tuk
[a three-wheel motor vehicle]. There was so much gas, from the canisters, that
the people carrying me fell down. The gas canisters were falling up to 500
meters from the fence. I was hit twice, in my right knee. The bullets
went right through. At the hospital they took arteries from my left leg and
replaced those in my right.
Khaled
al-Sabbah, 20, a freelance photojournalist, was taking photographs of Ashour
when he came under fire. He told Human Rights Watch:
I was there to cover the event.
None of the demonstrators had weapons of any kind. I was wearing a Kevlar vest,
with “PRESS” printed on it. The teargas [canisters] started landing at 400
meters from the fence, and I remember one canister reached the ambulance, which
was 500 meters away. They started shooting live fire at the guys planting olive
trees a few hundred meters from the fence. There was a lot of firing [of
bullets], aimed around our feet, and the [tear] gas shelling was continuous. I
was taking pictures of Ashour, who had been shot and fallen into a hole. They
were firing gas intensely while people were trying to carry Ashour away. I was
on the ground taking pictures, not standing up, when I was shot in the chest.
The vest protected me. I saw the dent and stood up, then I felt pain in my
chest from the impact, and fell down. The pain and the gas were too much for me
and I fainted. I woke up in the hospital.
Al-Sabbah
said that the bullet bruised his chest, and that he had been hospitalized three
times since the protest due to “difficulty breathing,” which he said was the
result of the substantial amount of teargas he inhaled.
