A Palestinian, seriously wounded by Israeli gunfire in the West Bank town of Jenin

OCCUPIED TERRITORIES, December 3 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – Several reports on Tuesday’s, December 3, morning media highlighted the atrocities committed by the Israeli army in the occupied territories.

The U.S. newspaper, the Washington Post, reported an incident which took place on Monday, December 2, in which the Israeli soldiers opened fire at a busy Jenin Market, which led to the death of 15-year-old Mutaz Odeh, the son of a Palestinian merchant.

Odeh, was on his way to the market to purchase sweets to sell at his father’s stand in downtown Jenin but returned home dead with a bullet in his lower back, the paper reported.

The market place was busy with people buying supplies for the Eid-ul-Fitr which starts after the end of the month of Ramadan.

“So tonight, when the family would have been breaking the Ramadan fast at a festive meal, the Odeh men instead were grieving over the youngster they had buried just after noon prayers,” said the post.

Odeh’s cousin told the Post that the soldiers were randomly shooting in all directions. The Israeli military, however, claimed that he was killed as he tried to climb onto an armored personnel carrier that witnesses said was about 150 yards from the shop, the Post reported.

“Odeh and other relatives described Mutaz as too overweight to clamber up a tank or armored personnel carrier,” the paper added.

The paper quoted Mohammed Abu Ghali, director of the Jenin Government Hospital saying that twenty-three Palestinians were injured during the shooting.

U.K. newspaper, the Independent, reported that in their incursion in the town of Beit Lahia in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, November 30, the Israeli army demolished a house on top of a 68-year-old deaf man.

Maher Salem, the man’s son told the Independent that when they found his father his head was “like a bar of chocolate, it was only two centimeters thick”.

The man whom the Israeli army were looking for was the old man’s son, Hisham, whom they claim was a senior official in the Islamic Jihad resistance group, and who allegedly planned a resistance operation in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street in 1996 that killed 20 Israelis, said the Independent. However, Hisham survived and was at his father’s funeral.

Salem was sleeping on the sixth-floor of the building, in which three generations of the family lives, when the Israeli army evacuated the building. The soldiers did not allow family members to bring the man out of the building and instead told them to leave immediately, then dynamited the house.

The Independent, said that while there were previous controversies about Palestinian claims that people have been buried alive in demolished houses, this time, there was a body.

“It had been buried when we arrived. We saw the freshly dug grave. And hundreds had turned up for the wake. This was not a show for the media: there were no other journalists in sight,” the paper said, adding that this is not the first time the claims of the sort turned out to be true.

“In Nablus in April, eight members of a single family died when a soldier bulldozed their house on top of them. Their bodies were found, and the case has been well documented by international human rights groups,” the paper reported.

Meanwhile, the UPI news agency reported that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan was concerned at Israel’s demolition of a World Food Program warehouse in the northern part of the Gaza Strip over the weekend.

Fred Eckhard, Annan’s chief spokesman, said that Anan supports the request by WFP that the government of Israel thoroughly investigate this incident, reported UPI.

“The secretary-general once again calls on the Israeli authorities to live up to their commitments and obligations to facilitate emergency humanitarian assistance in the occupied Palestinian territory.”

UPI quoted Jean-Luc Siblot, WFP country director, saying: “The food, which was housed on the ground floor of a three-story building and clearly marked as WFP property, mainly comprised donations from the European Commission and Sweden and was to be distributed by the Ministry of Social Affairs to some 41,300 destitute people affected by the ongoing humanitarian crises in the Gaza Strip.”

On Saturday, at about 10:50 p.m., the Israeli troops surrounded the area and parked six tanks in front of the building. They requested residents to evacuate their homes before entering the building and searching the premises.

“Despite the fact that the storage area was well marked as a WFP warehouse, with a large WFP flag and three WFP stickers on the doors, the soldiers proceeded to destroy the doors of the warehouse using tanks,” the agency reported.

The building’s owner saw dynamite sticks being placed in various parts and several blasts were heard at approximately midnight. These were followed by a large explosion from a projectile dropped from a helicopter.

“The building collapsed and everything left in it, including 413 metric tons of wheat flour, 107 metric tons of rice and 17 metric tons of vegetable oil, was destroyed,” the agency said.  

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