WEST BANK (Dispatches) – A 7-year-old Palestinian child has died while being chased by Zionist troops in the occupied West Bank, according to Palestinian Health Ministry.
A ministry statement said Rayyan Suleiman, from the town of Tuqu near Bethlehem city, had fallen from a height while running away from Zionist troops.
Medics failed to save his life and he was pronounced dead shortly after being admitted to Beit Jala Hospital, the statement said.
Rayan’s body was wrapped in a keffiyeh chequered Palestinian headscarf, as hundreds of people took part in a funeral procession through his hometown of Tuqu near Bethlehem.
The Palestinian boy’s father, Yaser, also said Zionist troops chased his son to their house, adding that Rayyan’s heart stopped beating because he was apparently so scared.
He noted that he put his son in his car and rushed to hospital but was stopped half way by Zionist troops, who checked his son. They let him drive on after they had made sure he was dead.
The development comes hours after Zionist troops arrested 28 Palestinians from various parts of the occupied West Bank during overnight operations.
The Hamas resistance movement has denounced the occupying regime’s crimes against Palestinian children as a “sadist” practice.
Reflecting on the incident, Hamas asserted that the Zionist regime’s “crimes against Palestinian children, people, land, and sanctities will not grant Israel security,” the Palestinian Information Center news agency reported.
Such deadly atrocities, the movement added, would rather “only boost the Palestinian resistance’s strength to defend the Palestinian lands and rights until the full liberation of Palestine.”
Zionist troops have recently been conducting overnight raids and killings in the northern occupied West Bank, mainly in the cities of Jenin and Nablus, where new groups of Palestinian resistance fighters have been formed.
More than 150 Palestinians have been killed by the regime’s troops in the Israeli-occupied territories since the start of the year, including 51 in the besieged Gaza Strip during the regime’s three-day onslaught in August.
More than 30 of those killed were either from Jenin or were killed in the Jenin region.