Shooting In Tel Aviv Prompts ‘Collective Punishment’ In Occupied Territories

Palestinians are banned from entering the West Bank city of Jenin, the Defense Ministry announced Saturday after a Palestinian shooter killed three Israeli people on Thursday.  Residents of the Jenin area with work permits in Israel will still be allowed to go there, but will face more stringent security inspections at checkpoints, the statement said.

The General Security Service said the suspect was shot and killed by the Israeli occupying forces following an exchange of fire, CNN reports.

Police spokesman Eli Levy said a “terrorist opened fire at short range and then fled on foot,” according to Reuters. He told residents in nearby areas not to leave their homes. “Don’t stick your heads out of the window. Stay off your balconies,” Levy said while on Channel 13.

“It’s an atmosphere of war. Soldiers and police are everywhere… They searched the restaurant,” and people are crying, restaurant worker Binyamin Blum told AFP.

It seems like a good opportunity for Zionists to ramp up their sanctions against the Palestinians.  

Nonetheless, the Palestinians have condemned the so-called “collective punishment” that the Israeli lawmakers are calling for against the backdrop of the latest incident.

Knesset member Sami Abu Shehadeh of the Joint List joined the condemnation, saying that “collective punishment, crimes carried out by the occupation army, and a continuous abuse of the Palestinian people will certainly not be a solution to the current crisis.”     

He added that “only a diplomatic solution and an end to the occupation are the guarantees for a safer future for all of us.”

The latest incident went viral on all social and traditional media platforms though Palestinians are dying every day with little or no media coverage. It has become clear that media imperialism is increasingly deepened in the Israeli and American societies.

A flurry of articles has been written on the incident, describing the incident as a “terrorist” attack. Meanwhile, the Israelis are attacking civilians, forcibly evacuating people from their homes, and killing children but no one is interested to talk about that. This, in return, exposes the Western and American double standards. 

Today, for instance, the Israeli occupation shot an “unarmed” woman in the occupied territories though the Israeli media remains silent. Equally concerning, is the amount of hate and racism Palestinians are expected to face because of the latest incident.

The Israeli army said it fired at the woman’s lower body after she approached a military checkpoint near the West Bank city of Bethlehem and ignored calls to stop and warning shots fired into the air. The Palestinian Health Ministry said the woman, who was in her 40s, later died from her injuries in a hospital.

“The Israeli escalation is an attempt to replace the negotiated political solution to the conflict with other solutions that reflect the real absence of the Israeli peace partner, and which reflect Israel’s denial of the political rights of the Palestinian people, foremost of which is their right to self-determination and the embodiment of its independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital,” said the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a statement

“There is no alternative to a negotiated political solution to the conflict on the basis of international legitimacy and its resolutions. All alternatives that Israel is trying to impose on the Palestinian people will fail,” the statement added.

Months ago, Amnesty International published a report on the human rights situation in the occupied territories which prompted a wide range of condemnation in the Israeli circles.

The report explicitly accuses Israel of “apartheid” and “institutionalized and systematic discrimination against Palestinians.” Amnesty said it has “concluded that Israel has perpetrated the international wrong of apartheid as a human-rights violation and a violation of public international law.”

The report, titled “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity,” accuses Israel of “institutionalized segregation and discrimination against Palestinians, as a racial group, in all areas under its control amounts to a system of apartheid, and a serious violation of Israel’s human rights obligations.”