Evidence Emerges of Israeli “Shoot To Cripple” Policy In the Occupied West Bank
http://www.alternet.org/world/evidence-emerges-israeli-shoot-cripple-policy-occupied-west-bank
At 10 PM on August 8, a twenty-year-old resident of the Al Amari refugee camp named Muhammad Qatri arrived dead at the Palestinian Medical Complex in Ramallah. He had been killed by Israeli soldiers during a protest near the illegal West Bank settlement of Psagot — shot through the heart right on the spot on his shirt that read, “Gaza.”
From the parking lot outside the hospital’s emergency room, a group of men bellowed chants about the latest unarmed young man to fall before Israeli gunfire in an usually bloody few weeks. I arrived at the hospital gates with a colleague and met Dr. Rajai Abukhalil, a 26-year-old resident physician who had just phoned Qatri’s father to deliver the bad news. Not even midway through his night shift, Abukhalil was already on his fifth coffee and still awaiting a free moment to take breakfast.
At a coffee kiosk behind the hospital’s emergency room, Abukhalil told me Qatri’s body arrived cold. The soldiers who killed him had apparently delayed his evacuation by at least an hour, possibly preventing the opportunity to save his life.
Most disturbing about the killing was how familiar scenes like it had become. According to Abukhalil, the Israeli army has exhibited a clear pattern of either shooting to kill or shooting to cripple over the past six months. Rather than disperse protests with traditional means like teargas and rubber coated metal bullets, the army has begun firing at protesters’ knees, femurs, or aiming for their vital organs.
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