Ramallah: Israeli occupation forces shot and killed a Palestinian motorist on Wednesday night after his car collided with a bus at the Occupied West Bank’s Gush Etzion Junction near Bethlehem.
The Israeli military claimed the driver rammed his car into a bus stop but the Palestinian community and the man’s relatives say it was a simple fender bender accident. The Palestinian Health Ministry said Suhaib Mousa Mashahrah, 21, from Al Sawahreh Al Sharqiyeh, in Occupied Jerusalem, was fatally wounded when occupation forces opened fire on his vehicle from close range.
He died soon afterwards at an Israeli hospital.
The Israeli army claimed a 60-year-old Israeli was slightly hurt in a ramming attack by a car driver, and was treated on the scene for minor injuries that did not require hospitalisation.
Palestinian sources say Israel has yet to turn over Mashahrah’s body — the regime routinely withholds the bodies of Palestinian alleged assailants to collectively punish the family. Adding insult to injury, Israeli forces raided the martyr’s hometown and arrested his mother and his two brothers, Nimr and Mohammad, and placed them under interrogation at Gush Etzion Detention Centre. Speaking to Gulf News, relatives of Mashahrah denied that he was trying to target Israelis and said occupation forces used excessive force instead of investigating the incident.
They urged Israel to review video footage of nearby security cameras.
The Palestinian territories have been rocked by a wave of violence since October 2015.
The Palestinian Health Ministry says 305 Palestinians have been killed, 63 of them from occupied East Jerusalem.
Israel is constantly being denounced for using lethal force on Palestinians posing no threat, with the United Nations condemning Israeli “extrajudicial executions.”
