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Video shows Israeli forces shooting Palestinians dead moments after surrender | Israel

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Video of an Israeli military attack in the West Bank shows soldiers summarily executing two Palestinians they had detained seconds earlier.

The shooting on Thursday evening, which was also witnessed by journalists near the scene, is under review by the Justice Ministry, but has already been defended by Israel’s far-right Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who declared that “terrorists must die”.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued a statement acknowledging that two people were shot during a joint IDF operation with Israeli Border Police around Jenin. It added that the shooting “is being reviewed by commanders on the ground and will be transferred to the relevant professional bodies”.

The footage, which has been widely circulated in Israeli and Arab media, shows Israeli soldiers surrounding a storage facility in an urban area.

Soldiers use a mechanical digger to break down the garage-style door, after which two men exit the building from under the damaged door and surrender themselves on their hands and knees, lifting up their shirts to show that they are unarmed.

Uniformed men, identified in Israeli media as Israeli Border Police officers, then approach them. An officer, who is not wearing a helmet and has a bald head and beard, is seen taking charge. He kicks the men while they are on the ground and can then be seen ordering the detainees back into the building under the damaged door.

A few seconds later, as the two victims are crawling away from their captors and have reached the threshold of the building, five Border Police officers who appeared on the scene raise their assault rifles, and the two captives fall to the ground.

“We are shocked by the brutal killing of two Palestinian men by Israeli border police yesterday in Jenin, in the occupied West Bank,” said Jeremy Lawrence, spokesman for the UN human rights office.

Yuli Novak, executive director of the B’Tselem human rights group, said, “The executions recorded today are the result of an accelerated process of dehumanization of Palestinians and the complete abandonment of their lives by the Israeli regime.”

“In Israel, there is no mechanism that acts to stop the killing of Palestinians or is able to prosecute those responsible.”

B’Tselem named the two killed as Yosef ‘Asa, aged 39, and al-Muntaser Bel-Lah ‘Abdallah, aged 26.

Israeli soldiers and police are rarely held accountable for killings of Palestinians, despite hundreds of allegations. B’Tselem stopped cooperating with the military review process in 2016, declaring it a “whitewash”.

What distinguishes Thursday’s killings in Jenin is the starkness of the video evidence. The IDF statement on the incident said it occurred during an IDF and Border Police operation in the Jenin area, where “security forces conducted an operation to capture wanted individuals who committed terrorist acts, including throwing explosives and firing at security forces”.

“The wanted individuals were linked to a terrorist network in the Jenin region,” the statement said. “Forces entered the area, surrounded the structure in which the suspects were located, and initiated a surrender process that lasted several hours.”

“After the use of engineering equipment on the structure, both suspects were ejected,” it said. “After they came out, shots were fired toward the suspects.”

The statement said: “The incident is being reviewed by commanders on the ground and will be transferred to the relevant professional bodies.”

However, Ben-Gvir issued his own statement saying that he “provides full support to the members of the Border Police and the IDF fighters who fired on the wanted terrorists who came out of a building in Jenin”.

The minister, who was convicted in 2007 of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organisation, said: “The fighters did exactly what was expected of them – the terrorists must die.”



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