Sadiya A Nadeem
Saudi Gazette
“Graphic content - This video is difficult to watch.” “The contents of this video may not be suitable for viewers.” For the past two weeks, videos with these disclaimers have been circulating on Facebook and Twitter. They are horrifying and disturbing, and will probably scare the living daylights out of one. Still images are equally chilling. The videos and images are coming from Palestine of young, innocent, unarmed Palestinians being brutally harassed, attacked and murdered in broad daylight.
“Israel is a War Criminal,” a Facebook page with more than 1 million followers, have posted videos showing heavily armed Israeli soldiers harassing young Palestinian boys. In one of the videos, the boy is crying while being held around the neck; and in another, a nervous boy — in what appears to be a deserted valley — is asked to raise his hands and stand on a foot by two soldiers before the video abruptly finishes. Other videos, unfortunately, reveal similar content.
A picture, which many netizens said would remain embedded in their minds, is of 13-year-old Ahmad Masara who was shot and then taunted by Israeli onlookers as he lay in an awkward position bleeding and crying for help. And if that wasn’t enough, he was handcuffed to his hospital bed. Wonder how much of a threat is a young boy, who can’t even walk, to the Israeli soldiers.
Palestinians are just being shot for random bizarre reasons — for wearing hijab, or randomly on the bus, or while going to school among others. Mohammad Zeyara, an activist, public speaker and medical student, uploaded an image on his Facebook page of a young Palestinian female surrounded by 10 Israeli soldiers who shot her together. How much harm can one unarmed female cause to 10 heavily equipped soldiers?
Two images uploaded by @Tweet_Palestine show cold-blooded murders of 16-year-old Mutaz Iwaisat and 17-year-old Bayan Iysaleh. Israeli soldiers shot Iwaisat, who lies in a pool of blood, when he was on his way to school as they thought he might be carrying a knife in his bag. Nothing was found though. Iysaleh was shot and left bleeding to death after she was accused of attacking the soldiers. Lets say that they did carry a knife. Can a knife really compete against live ammunition?
Everyone — school going children, teen boys and girls, women, pregnant women — threatens the mighty Israeli soldiers, and their hate toward the Palestinians is so deep-rooted that they attack anyone who might even remotely looks like a Palestinian. A fellow Israeli stabbed Uri Rezken, an Israeli Jew, four times in the back after he was mistaken for a Palestinian. According to The Guardian, Rezken told Israeli TV that the act was a hate crime and he was attacked based on religious differences. Al Jazeera reported that an Eritrean was killed after he was also mistaken for a Palestinian.
Does it end here? No. Anyone who protects Palestinians faces rocks and bullets. Israeli settlers attacked a sexagenarian British man, David Amos, because he was helping Palestinian farmers on an olive grove. According to the International Business Times, Amos and his colleagues were visiting the West Bank from the Olive Harvest Trust, which recruits overseas volunteers to work on Palestinians’ olive groves. The organization believed that by engaging volunteers to support Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest, it would make it “less likely that settlers and Israeli military will harass the farmers”.
Israeli military or settlers have destroyed 800,000 olive trees since 1967.
Since the beginning of October, 47 Palestinians have been killed in shootings and thousands injured.
