Accounts Differ Concerning Injury To CNN Reporter In Occupied Territory Clashes
CHICAGO (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - CNN's Cairo Bureau Chief Ben Wedeman was shot on Tuesday while covering clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
CNN claimed its reporter was caught in crossfire between Israeli forces and Palestinians, saying that Wedeman was lying down as Palestinians and Israelis exchanged gunfire when a live round struck him on his right side, entering near his waist and exiting near under his right arm.
But reports of the French News Agency AFP said he was shot by Israeli forces that opened fire on a group of reporters who were covering clashes at the Karni crossing point between the Gaza Strip and Israel.
An AFP photographer, who was among those caught in the firing, said Israeli tanks fired machineguns and four shells in the direction of the reporters.
Wedeman was rushed off to the Palestinian al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza where Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat paid a hospital to him visit late Tuesday.
Arafat spent just a few minutes in the fourth-floor ward of the Shifa hospital where the correspondent, Wedeman, is being treated for a bullet wound. Arafat kissed him on the cheeks and asked Wedeman, who speaks Arabic, how he was feeling.
Wedeman has been living on and off in the Middle East and is widely recognized for being the first Western journalist to obtain an interview with Udai Saddam Hussein, son of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, in March of 1997.
Clashes have been mounting in the Occupied Territories and the Addameer organization reported that at least 100 Palestinians were injured today.
The clashes yesterday left one Palestinian dead and another brain-dead.
Intensified Israeli settler attacks on Palestinian residents either traveling on major roads, attempting to harvest olive orchards, or in residential areas have become daily phenomena.
The Ramallah-based human rights organization, which has been reporting and chronicling the clashes said that eyewitnesses reported Israeli settlers firing on Palestinian protesters during clashes alongside the Israeli military in a number of areas in the North.
Large areas of agricultural land throughout the West Bank and Gaza have been bulldozed and trees uprooted by Israeli settlers and military.
