Ma'an
An army unit that assassinated three Fatah members during a night operation in Nablus was under orders to "carry out a raid and capture the wanted men," the Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Saturday.
"The orders did not include instructions to kill any of the three wanted men. The senior officers who spoke with Haaretz stressed that the soldiers were not given any verbal instructions that were different from those in writing," according to the report.
The attack infuriated Palestinian Authority officials in Ramallah, particularly security officials who had already detained 150 people the day before on suspicion of involvement in the shooting death of a settler, the incident thought to have sparked the retaliatory raid. "Israel trades in Palestinian life as if it were worthless," said chief PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat in response to the bloodshed.
Family members and witnesses told Ma'an that the men, Raed Sarakji, 38, Ghassan Abu Sharkh, 39, Anan Subih, 33, were extra-judicially assassinated, echoing the results of an investigation conducted by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), which concluded they "were executed in cold blood."
Sarkaji's wife, Tahani, 38, on Wednesday took Ma'an's correspondent through her home, recounting the assassination step by step. She pointed out chunks of walls and doors taken out by gunshots and what she suspected was some kind of explosive used to burst through the front gate. Dozens of bullet holes riddled the walls, doors, ceiling, mirrors and windows both inside and outside the bedroom where her husband died.
"That's blood," she explained, pointing toward the ceiling. "From when they sprayed his corpse with bullets. Our daughter saw that."
Tahani and Raed were asleep when Israeli soldiers burst into the home yelling "get out, get out," she said, insisting that her husband told the soldiers he would leave voluntarily, but that they opened fire anyway. "He fell between my hands bleeding. ... Then soldiers broke the door and got in. He was already dead, but they continued to riddle his body with bullets to make sure he was killed."
Haaretz quoted an Israeli military officer who was there. "The wanted man came out of the room and realized that it was the army, and rushed back inside," the officer said. "The force commander called to his soldiers to make sure he did not have a weapon. Several minutes later he came out again, behind his wife. His hands were hidden. The soldiers called out to him repeatedly, in Arabic, to lift his hands, and he did not do so. There was little choice. The threat to the soldiers was just too great," the officer added.
"No matter what they tell you, no matter what, I swear we were sleeping when this happened," Tahani insisted, although the military never actually alleged that her husband resisted arrest, nor that weapons of any kind were found in the house after they killed him. "Do we look like terrorists? This is a family living here, kids living here," she added, surrounded by children and cousins preparing lunch.
"We want peace," Tahani said. "I really don't know how many more times I can say it: we want peace."
Haaretz reported that the army's Duvdevan commando unit received its orders late on Christmas night, several hours before it stormed the northern West Bank city. Conceding that even according to the military two of the men were unarmed and none attempted to flee, the report states, "An evaluation of the testimonies of family members and the IDF officers suggests that this was not an operation to assassinate."
"But it is difficult not to wonder how two unarmed men, nearly 40 years old, sleeping in bed near their children and not behaving as wanted men, were killed without even having attempted to escape," the author notes. "It appears that, like in many other operations of this sort, the reality on the ground, and especially early intelligence on the three suspects [that they were dangerous], predetermined the result of the operation."
In fact, however, similar results of operations of this sort are rare. The Israeli military's version of events, in which all three of the supposed arrest targets were killed "as they refused to surrender," stands in contrast to most outcomes of the army's nightly house raids in the West Bank, which typically end without violence.
Statistically, if Israel's explanation were accurate, the unintentional deaths of three targets in a single night would be an unprecedented coincidence. In the month preceding Saturday's killings, the army invaded Nablus district and detained Palestinians on at least 29 occasions. In none of these operations was a soldier or Palestinian seriously injured, even when the incursion was accompanied by clashes.
On the night of 8 December, for example, Israeli forces detained 10 Palestinians in five Nablus-area locales. No injuries were reported, even though soldiers reported finding guns and ammunition in one of the homes. On 13 December, Israeli forces stormed Nablus and detained an elderly woman from her home, as well as two teenagers allegedly found to be in possession of explosives near a checkpoint. Again, no injuries. Clashes accompanied a raid outside of Nablus on 28 November, when another teenager was arrested, but no one was hurt. This was despite that the army reportedly opened fire during the operation.
Other such incidents included the abductions of three teenage boys at a Nablus checkpoint on 9 December, nine Palestinians from Nablus on 16 December, at least one from a Nablus-area refugee camp on 25 December, and a night raid on a Nablus home on 14 December. None of these resulted in injury, either.
In contrast with each of these incursions in and around Nablus over the past month and hundreds of others elsewhere in the West Bank that ended without incident, early last Saturday, in three separate "arrest raids" in three separate neighborhoods, all three of the army's intended targets managed to die. Full story
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