WEST BANK (Dispatches) – Resistance groups based in the Gaza Strip have censured the Zionist regime’s army’s killing of a Palestinian teenage boy near the West Bank city of Bethlehem.
Mohammad Shehadeh, 14, was killed by Zionist troops’ gunfire in the town of al-Khader on Tuesday, the Palestinian Health Ministry said, urging an international investigation into the murder.
The Palestinian Wafa news agency quoted local activist Ahmad Salah as saying that Zionist troops opened live fire injuring Shehadeh before detaining him and that they prevented ambulances from reaching the victim.
The Islamic Jihad resistance movement condemned the heinous crime committed by the Zionist enemy.
The killing of the Palestinian boy in cold blood is an obvious embodiment of terrorism and aggression against the defenseless people of Palestine, it added.
Similarly, the Hamas resistance group said the murder once again proved the brutality and terrorist acts of the Zionist regime against the innocent Palestinian nation.
It also warned that Shehadeh’s blood will pursue the occupying regime and its criminal leaders “like a curse” and will ignite a revolution and uprising against the enemy.
The regime’s military claimed in a statement that Shehadeh was among three suspects who “hurled Molotov cocktails at passing drivers, endangering their lives.”
The killing came hours after a video went viral of Zionist troops attacking an intellectually disabled young Palestinian man in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of the occupied East Al-Quds.
The troops violently attacked the residents of Sheikh Jarrah flashpoint neighborhood and other Palestinians who gathered in the area to voice their solidarity with families threatened with expulsion from their homes.
Among those attacked was Mohammed al-Ajlouni, who suffered from Down syndrome. The Palestinian Information Center cited a Palestine Red Crescent Society paramedic as saying that Israeli forces physically assaulted him.
The atrocity came amid heightened tensions in an around the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in the holy occupied city of Al-Quds. On February 13, Zionist troops and illegal settlers renewed their attacks against the neighborhood, where more than a dozen Palestinian families face expulsion by the regime.
Meanwhile, a rights group says the Zionist regime has refused to hand over the bodies of nine Palestinian children, whom it has killed since 2016.
Reporting the matter on Tuesday, Defense for Children International - Palestine (DCI) said the practice was in violation of both the international law and the principles of human rights.
The international law, which the regime was contravening by withholding the bodies, “includes an absolute prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and stipulates that parties to armed conflict must bury the dead in an honorable manner,” the DCI said.
“It falls under the policy of collective punishment practiced by the occupation against the Palestinian people, and the harm caused to the families of the martyrs as a result, amounts to collective punishment that violates international humanitarian law,” it added.
The Palestinian children were all under 18, when they were murdered by the regime under the pretext of “carrying out stabbing attacks.”
The youngest of the children, who were killed as early as 2016 and as late as December 2021, were two 15-year-olds.