Ramallah: A young Palestinian man died of his injuries on Tuesday after being shot by an Israeli soldier in the village of Al Araqa near Jenin.
At the time of the shooting the victim was with his relatives on family land close to the separation barrier.
The martyr Mohammad Murad Yahya, 18, was pronounced dead in a Nablus hospital after the Israeli authorities refused to allow him to receive treatment inside Israel.
Sources in Jenin told Gulf News the victim and his family were preparing for his elder brother’s wedding party and that family members from Jordan had managed to arrive in the West Bank to attend the ceremony. The sources said Yahya accompanied his relatives to the family land near the separation barrier where Israeli soldiers objected to the group’s presence and ordered the family members to leave the site.
The sources said that an Israeli soldier did not give the victim and his relatives a chance to leave, and shot Yahya point-blank. Yahya suffered a serious abdominal injury and bled profusely.
The occupation forces then prevented Palestinian ambulances from taking the victim to hospital and detained two of Yahya’s relatives who were visiting the West Bank for the first time.
The sources said that after half an hour of continuous bleeding, Yahya was taken to a Jenin hospital, which declared nothing could be done to save him. At that time, Palestinian medical authorities petitioned Israeli authorities to transfer him to Israel for treatment but they refused to grant an entry permit.
Yahya was referred to Rafidya Hospital in Nablus where he underwent two operations but died of his injuries.
In order to build the separation barrier which splits the village in half, the Israeli occupation forces seized huge areas of land from the village of Al Araqa.
The Palestinian Presidency condemned Yahya’s killing and said that it held the Israeli regime responsible.
The presidency said in a statement that the current escalation in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem and the daily killings is a clear and undeniable Israeli rejection of the two-state solution and devastating for peace talks in the region.
Yahya is the third Palestinian man to be gunned down in the past three days by the occupation forces. In the previous incidents, occupation forces shot and killed a young Palestinian in Al Tour in occupied East Jerusalem as well as another young Palestinian in Hebron.
