On July 12, Israeli soldiers shot a 10-year-old Palestinian boy in the head with live ammunition during protests against settlement expansion in the town of Kafr Qaddum in the occupied West Bank. The boy, identified as Abdul Rahman Yasser Shteiwi, was gravely wounded and is fighting for his life in a hospital in the West Bank.
The injured boy was rushed to the Rafidia hospital in Nablus around 3 pm and was thereafter operated upon immediately. Dr. Othman, head of neurosurgery at Rafidia hospital, said, “He had a penetrating injury in the frontal lobe on the right side. The injury was severe and there are more than 100 fragments.”
Dr. Othman added that it was a metal bullet, not a rubber one, saying that a rubber bullet would not have been able to penetrate the head.
Activists from the group International Solidarity Movement, who were on the ground while the protests were going on, said that they found a 5.56 mm bullet case on the ground 15 minutes after the protests. They said it was “hot to touch”, indicating that it had been fired recently.
Residents of Kafr Qaddum have been holding weekly protests for the last nine years against the closure of the main road to the city of Nablus due to an expansion of nearby settlements. Israeli forces target them with tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets in an attempt to suppress the protests.
Israeli forces also injured at least 74 Palestinians during the latest round of the Friday Great March of Return protests on the Gaza-Israel border. This was the 66th week of the protests by Palestinians for an end to the 12-year-long land, air and sea blockade of the Gaza strip by Israel, as well as for the implementation of the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
According to various rights groups, the injured include 23 children, two women, two journalists and two paramedics. Since the beginning of the Great March of Return protests in Gaza on March 30, 2018, Israel has killed more than 306 Palestinians and injured 17,000 others.
14 Palestinians abducted
On July 11, in a series of raids in the occupied West Bank, Israeli security forces abducted around 14 Palestinians and injured two others.
The Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS) reported that five Palestinians were kidnapped from their homes in Kafr Malek and al-Mazra’a al-Gharbiyya villages in the central West Bank governorate of Ramallah. In the Jenin governorate in northern West Bank, three Palestinians were abducted by Israeli soldiers.
Four more Palestinians were abducted from Qalqilia in northern West Bank, from Bethlehem, south of occupied East Jerusalem, and from the town of Qotna, west of Jerusalem. Local sources also reported abductions at the al-Deheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem. The PPS reported that during the raids, Israeli soldiers invaded and ransacked homes.
In the incident at the al-Deheisheh camp, Israeli forces injured two men with live bullets and fired tear gas at others.
