On October 19, Sarah Mahamid watched helplessly from a window as Israeli security forces shot her younger brother.
Taha, 15, was playing with a friend outside his home in the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarem.
The 19-year-old screamed as her brother fell to the ground.
Their father, Ibrahim, ran out the front door to get his son, but a gunman also shot him.
“I remember hearing my father scream that Taha could be alive, (…) but I knew that Taha was martyred. I knew he was dead,” Sarah told Al Jazeera.
Taha was killed instantly. Ibrahim fought for his life for five months in intensive care until he died.
Footage seen by Al Jazeera shows that Taha and Ibrahim were unarmed and posed no threat.
“My other brother ran after my father out the door to stop him. He saw that Taha was dead and he saw my father get shot.
“It looked like steam or smoke was rising from my father’s body when the bullets hit him.”
Illegal and random killings
About 1,500 Palestinians have been unlawfully killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank over the past 16 years – 98% of them civilians, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Each of them, like Taha and Ibrahim, has a story and loved ones who mourn them.
The frequency of murders has increased in recent years, with Israel killing 509 Palestinians in 2023. This is more than double the number recorded by OCHA in any previous year.
In the first three months of this year, 131 Palestinians were killed, a higher homicide rate than the previous year, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).
“Israel has a decades-long pattern of using lethal force against Palestinians, … but it appears that the Israeli government is taking further steps in this direction,” said Omar Shakir, Israel-Palestine director at HRW.
Israel maintains that its operations in the West Bank are necessary for security reasons. It cites the same justification for its attack on the Gaza Strip, which killed 35,000 Palestinians in response to the October 7 attacks led by Hamas against Israel, which killed 1,139 people.
Deaths in the West Bank are committed during attacks on homes or during stops and pursuits at Israeli checkpoints.
Some Palestinian children they were even killed on the way to school, according to HRW.
“[The Israelis] they are shooting people who do not pose an imminent threat to life. They also shoot at people fleeing and at people who are injured and lying on the ground. Some of these trends existed before, but it seems that these incidents are happening more frequently,” Shakir told Al Jazeera.
Shoot to kill
Israeli authorities have for years supported a shoot-to-kill policy, regardless of whether Palestinians being shot pose a threat. Israel even authorized its army to fire against rock throwers and distributed assault rifles to Israeli Jews living in illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Settlers killed 17-year-old Omar Abdel Ghani Hamid when they attacked his West Bank village on April 13. Omar was one of several young men who confronted the settlers to stop them from beating Palestinians and attacking their homes.
Omar’s father, Ahmed, said his son and his friends scared the settlers even though they did not carry weapons. However, one of the settlers returned with a pistol and shot Omar.
“The bullet passed through the right side of the head and exited through the left. He died immediately. Thank God he didn’t suffer much pain,” Ahmed said.
Ahmed learned of Omar’s death through a WhatsApp group that all residents use to notify each other about settler attacks. Later that morning, his son was pronounced dead at a hospital.
Ahmed said he is seeking justice, but Israeli Jews are almost never held accountable by Israeli authorities.
From 2017 to 2021, less than 1 percent of all the legal complaints Palestinians have filed against Israeli soldiers, including for extrajudicial killings, have led to prosecutions, said Israeli rights group Yesh Din.
During this period, only three Israeli soldiers were convicted of killing Palestinians and received lenient sentences. Others were forced to do “community military service” for killing Palestinians, he said.
“There is a culture in which Israeli units know they can commit serious abuses without being held accountable for their abuses,” said HRW’s Shakir.
‘Colonizing our minds’
The military strikes and extrajudicial killings are part of a broader attempt to keep Palestinians in the West Bank “in fear,” said Zaid Shuabi, an analyst and activist with the Palestinian rights group Al-Haq.
But it ended up leading to the formation of a new generation of armed groups, often made up of young people who are fed up with the transgressions of the occupation.
Israel’s response to this new wave of resistance has been to target entire communities to crush Palestinian morale, Shuabi said.
“They want to reshape the Palestinian mind into thinking that we should not even dare to resist. And if we do, we will pay a heavy price,” he told Al Jazeera.
“It’s about intimidating us. They want to take us down… and colonize our minds.”
Sarah believes this was the purpose of the Israeli attack on her family. She said that while her father and brother bled to death in the street, Israeli soldiers entered her home.
The Israeli army then cut off the water and electricity to his home. At one point, one of the Israeli soldiers began hitting Sarah’s other brother with the butt of his rifle, telling him to remain silent.
Moments before the soldiers left, Sarah summoned the courage to ask why they terrorized her family.
“He said, ‘To scare you,’” Sarah told Al Jazeera. “I couldn’t believe it. I wondered what was wrong with them.
“They killed my brother and my father just to scare me.”
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
