Israeli Army 'Provoked Palestinian Teenager And Then Shot Him'

[Purveyor]

The claim contradicts an account given by the Israeli army, which says 16-year-old Samir Awad was shot after cutting through a section of the security fence as he tried "infiltrate into Israel".

The teenager died on Tuesday after being shot three times. He was hit from behind as he was running away from Israeli troops in the village of Boudrous, according to his family. Doctors at Ramallah Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, said he had suffered gunshot wounds to his neck, leg and torso.

--CLIP
That was challenged on Wednesday by Samir Awad's family, teachers and school friends, who said he had approached the fence only after being incited by Israeli troops, who had used loudspeakers to provoke pupils at Boudrous Secondary School, which sits 200 yards away, into a confrontation.

"They were shouting, 'Come dogs, Come to the wall," 10-year-old Khaled Shaheen told The Daily Telegraph. "They were also calling us sons-of-bitches and saying your mothers are dogs and adulteresses. They were shouting on the loudspeakers before Samir left his class.

MORE...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/9806820/Israeli-army-provoked-Palestinian-teenager-and-then-shot-him.html

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

1. He was hit from behind = shot in the back.

I thought only terrorists and criminals shoot people in the back?

[Mosby]

4. There is no verification

His family is making that claim, not the hospital or a coroner.

tragic event nonetheless.

[azurnoir]

10. there are several sources that substantiate that 'claim'

albeit I sure for some nothing less than Netanyahu himself saying that will do, it's okay though

[shira]

17. There aren't any reputable sources substantiating such a claim. n/t

[azurnoir]

18. so + 972 is not reputable thanks guess now we can discount this

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1134&pid=28169

thanks again

[cpwm17]

2. This reminds me of what Chris Hedges witnessed in the Gaza Strip

as written in the October 2001 edition of Harper's Magazine:

http://www.bintjbeil.com/articles/en/011001_hedges.html

It is still. The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then, out of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loudspeaker.

"Come on, dogs," the voice booms in Arabic. "Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!"...

The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what is to come.

A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos.

The Israeli soldiers were murdering Palestinian kids for sport.

[railsback]

3. I saw a show on PBS a few years ago about the Israelis target practicing on Palestinians

I believe the reporting team was British, hiding out in a Palestinian home because they didn't leave before curfew. The Palestinian
family implored them to stay put, but the group ventured out into the darkness, waving a white flag and their press credentials. The man carrying the
flag was shot through the neck.

I've been searching for the longest time for that show on the PBS website, but they have no record of it. Obviously archived in an unnamed location due to political pressure.

[cpwm17]

5. It was on HBO

Here it is:

[railsback]

12. Thanks!

You rock.

Wrong place I was. It was a while, but that scene will stick with me forever.

[eyl]

13. Problem is, his account is contradicted by other facts

1) Hedges explicitly says the children in question were out of his sight when the shootings occured. Despite this, he describes how the soldiers shoot them. Furthermore, in a later radio interview, he claims he did see the shootings themselves. This is the primary point which leads me to question his honesty in this account (as opposed to his gulliblity).

2) Hedges describes how the soldiers used silencers. Presumably, he could identify that those were indeed silencers by the fact that no noise was heard (also, I'm not sure if this version of the account has been slightly edited or not, because ISTR in the original article he described the bullets as "tumbling silently", but I may be misremembering). However, there are several problems with this claim. First of all, silencers are hardly standard IDF combat equipment. More importantly, movies to the contrary, it's impossible to silence an M16 assault rifle. The M16 has a muzzle velocity of Mach 3 - a considerable portion of the noise is the supersonic boom the bullet makes travelling through the air. While there are silencers intended for the M16, these do not silence the shot - instead, they are intended to muffle the shot in the shooter's ears,(avoiding deafening when firing in an enclosed space) and to make it more difficult to locate him by the sound.
I suppose, in theory, you could make a special subsonic bullet, but you'd lose both range and power, and you'd need to recalibrate your sights - which means you'd be in real trouble if you got into a combat situation, since you couldn't use normal ammunition without recalibrating your sights again, not something which can be done swiftly under fire. What Hedges saw were most likely rubber bullet dispensers (which look kind of like movie silencers), but given his supposed experience - and the resulting sounds - I'm puzzled how he mistook them for silencers.

3) Lastly, Hedges describes, with great pathos, how

The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos".

Later, he writes

Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen

This section is dated June 17th, so we have one dead child in Khan Younis plus 4 injured (note that Hedges claims he saw the injured, not just that he was told about them). In addition, we have 8 people killed/injured (he doesn't specify) the day before. Note that these are just events in Khan Younis, not taking into account events elsewhere in the Territories.
Now, according to B'Tselem's detailed list of fatalities*, there were two boys from Khan Younis killed that day, There seems to be some dispute as to where they were kileld, as the entries both list them killed in Ganei Tal, in the Gaza Strip, and in Tapuah, which is in the West Bank, not Gaza. However, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society maintains (or maintained - I looked this up at the time, but I can't find the page now) a list of Palestinian fatalities/injuries per day (though without a breakdown by age, gender, location, or circumstances). Looking at the page for June 2001, it listed for June 17th one fatality and no injuries; and on the previous day, there were a total of 6 injuries - and again, these figures are totaled across Gaza and the West Bank. So either Hedges invented the 4 injured children (as well as 2 injured the day before, even assuming all 6 of the wounded were in Khan Younis), or someone deceived him. Neither possibility speaks well of the veracity of his account. And if he was deceived - how does he know what the soldiers were calling out? If he speaks Arabic, surely he could have determined whether someone was injured or not (unless the doctors and children were lying); if not, he's dependent on someone else's translation - quite possibly the same persion who deceived him.

*http://old.btselem.org/statistics/english/Casualties_Data.asp?Category=1®ion=GAZA&sD=29&sM=09&sY=2000&eD=26&eM=12&eY=2008&filterby=event&oferet_stat=before

[cpwm17]

20. I have no interest in promoting falsehoods

Hedges is hyperbolic in his language, but I've haven't noticed any dishonesty. I'll keep an open mind on this particular claim by Hedges.

He says he speaks Arabic. From this quote it seems he had help from the locals on the language:

The residents in the camp insist the Arabic accent (from the shooters) is Lebanese. They believe that mercenaries from the South Lebanese Army, once a Christian proxy army for Israel and long a bitter foe of the Palestinians, have been integrated into the Israeli force. The word in Palestinian Arabic meaning "to shoot"—ahousak—is never heard over the loudspeakers but rather the Lebanese word in Arabic, atoohak. And the Palestinians in the camp say that they can hear Lebanese music coming from the guard posts.

[shira]

16. Hedges is a propagandist who has no business working for a reputable news organization.

His allegations aren't backed by verifiable facts.

Many of his worst claims are contradicted by other witnesses or journalists on the scene.

==========

He should write fiction instead.

[oberliner]

6. Always good to get the RW British perspective

Good old Tory-graph - kind of weird to be interviewing ten year olds, don't you think?

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

7. "kind of weird to be interviewing ten year olds, don't you think?"

Not really. If they were witnesses to the crime then it is perfectly relevant.

[Purveyor]

8. When left with nothing else, attack the source, eh Ober...? LOL Consistent, I'll give you that at

least.

[Scootaloo]

9. Really, Oberliner?

It's interesting that you poo-poo the Telegraph as "right-wing" but have nothing to say about Algemeiner or Arutz Sheva or Gatestone Institute or the Australian or Ynet or so many others.

How oddly selective.

[azurnoir]

11. +972 also said much the same but for some reason you do not seem to like that one either

and I really do not understand, +972 is written largely by Israeli's in fact most of its writers are Israeli Jews the site itself is a testament to the fact that all Israeli's are not Rightwingers hungry for Palestinian land, so I really do not understand your seeming problem with that source

[oberliner]

14. What do you think really happened here? nt

[Solindsey]

15. Are they still going to play the victim?

By "they" I mean Israeli Zionists. You know, those folks that stick their noses up at Hamas like they're not just as f***ed up as them. It's like looking in a mirror with these extremists. Killing is so easy for them.

[Purveyor]

19. When you can 'ice skate in hell' perhaps... eom