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NABLUS, VESTBREDDEN (VG) Hamdan left the table before he had finished his dinner. He was just going out to help his uncle deliver some cartons of plastic folders, so straight home.
As it drew to a close, his mother got an uneasy feeling that something was wrong.
On Monday evening last week, October 30, the mood was tense in Nablus, a city on the Israeli-occupied West Bank in Palestine.
In the roughly three weeks that had passed since Hamas carried out the terrorist attack against Israel, the number of military actions against the inhabitants of the West Bank had skyrocketed. A record number of Palestinians had been killed by Israeli soldiers. Now anger and fear dominated on both sides.
Hamdan was sitting in the back seat of his uncle’s car when they spotted several Israeli military vehicles blocking the road.
The uncle, Nedal Amera (37), says that he turned the car around to avoid driving past the soldiers. Then it hit. The back seat was filled with blood.
At home, the mother had started to get really worried when she got the message: her son had been injured in a car accident.
No one said he had been shot in the head.
– I could feel that something had happened to my son. I knew they lied to me, says the mother.
– I went to the hospital, and they said that everything was fine with him. But I didn’t get to see him.
At the same time, Hamdan was in the intensive care unit fighting for his life.
While the eyes of the world are focused on the bombs raining down on the Gaza Strip, the situation for Palestinians here in the West Bank is becoming increasingly difficult.
– We are scared, says the uncle.
– We have lived a life of oppression for so long, and we are used to it. But now it’s completely different.
The West Bank has been occupied since 1967, and remained in Israel’s power even after the country withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
Almost the entire area is framed by high walls and border fences, and all border crossings are manned full-time by armed Israeli soldiers.
– Before 7 October, Israeli soldiers could perhaps stop you and ask where you were going. And they used rubber bullets, says the uncle.
After the terrorist attack, the rubber bullets have been replaced by live ammunition.
– Now they rush to kill, says the uncle.
13-year-old Hamdan is described as a good at school, a polite boy who was loved by everyone. He liked to play football, and had plans to study so that he could realize his dream of becoming a lawyer.
– He always wanted to help everyone, says the mother.
In the weeks before he was shot, he had been looking after his grandmother in the hospital.
– He said: “I’m so afraid that something will happen to her if I’m not there”, says the mother.
Hamdan lived with his grandmother in the hospital for over two weeks. The day after he came home, he himself was taken to the hospital.
The bullet that hit Hamdan went through the back window of the car and right through his skull.
Photo: Private
The same day, a little further north, a 14-year-old was shot dead by Israeli soldiers, according to the Palestinian human rights organization Defense for Children International.
On the same day that VG visited the family in Nablus, Israeli forces killed four Palestinians in Tulkarm, further west in the West Bank.
The four allegedly belonged to a cell that took orders from Hamas, and which was behind several attacks with firearms, according to the Israeli Defense Forces.
A 14-year-old was also injured in the attack, according to the Palestinian News Agency He died. The Israeli defense maintains that the raids are still necessary to weed out terrorists.
– But Hamdan was just a child, says the uncle.
– He had done nothing wrong. He was just sitting in a car.
For two days they hoped Hamdan would wake up. On the third day he was pronounced dead.
The West Bank has been the scene of a number of bloody uprisings in recent decades. In the last four weeks, human rights organizations have sounded the alarm.
– We have seen an alarming increase in Israel’s “shoot to kill” practice, says Shahd Qaddoura, who works for the human rights organization Al-Haq in Ramallah on the West Bank, to VG.
– This is not new – the practice has existed for several decades.
But 2023 has been the deadliest and bloodiest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since 2004, according to the Israeli Human Rights Organization B’tselem.
160 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the October 7 terrorist attack, the Palestinian News Agency reported He died 6. november.
There are more than in the whole of 2022, which was already one record year.
Photo: Private
At the same time, it is reported that Jewish settlers are becoming more and more aggressive, which has led to an increase in the number of internally displaced Palestinians since October 7, according to FN.
– We fear that we will suffer the same fate as those in the Gaza Strip.
– Only without the rockets, says Mayada, the mother of Hamdan.
The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are geographically separated and cut off from each other by walls, fences and border guards.
The family in Nablus does not have to hear the bomb drones that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are fleeing from. Yet the war there feels dangerously close.
– We are one people, she says.
They have stopped letting their children watch cartoons and only watch the news to follow developments in the Gaza Strip minute by minute.
– There is no future, says Mayada.
– I lost my son. They killed a child and his dreams.
Bassam Abu Alrub contributed in the field to this report.
On the West Bank: Ingri Bergo and Espen Rasmussen. Published:
Published: 08.11.23 at 19:07
2023-11-08 18:07:28
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