3 year old Palestinian girl shot in the head
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URL: https://www.islamicity.org/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=34599
Printed Date: 23 November 2024 at 11:58pm
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Topic: 3 year old Palestinian girl shot in the head
Posted By: TG12345
Subject: 3 year old Palestinian girl shot in the head
Date Posted: 25 September 2015 at 8:00pm
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Today, as every Friday, there were violent clashes taking place in Kafr Kaddum, the village where for years people have been fighting for the right to use their own road.
Three year old Maram Abed al-Latif al-Qaddumi was standing on her balcony. Maybe she was playing. Maybe she was resting. Maybe she was watching the chaos taking place. She was certainly not taking part in the demonstration. To the soldiers, no doubt enraged by the boys and young men throwing rocks and refusing to retreat from the teargas and live ammunition and skunk water and "rubber bullets", it didn't matter. One of them evidently saw her, took aim, and fired. Shot with a rubber coated steel bullet, she was hit in the head, and began bleeding heavily. Her father rushed her to an ambulance. He was shot also. Fortunately, after a few hours they were released. Thank God she is alive. I have a hard time even beginning to imagine how much hatred it must take to be able to shoot a rubber bullet at a toddler. Praying for peace and justice. There needs to be a situation where both Palestinians and Israelis live in freedom and equality, and where no parent has to live with the fear that his or her child may be shot. http://palsolidarity.org/2015/09/3-year-old-daughter-of-nablus-police-chief-shot-in-face-in-kafr-qaddum-demonstration/ |
Replies:
Posted By: Ron Webb
Date Posted: 25 September 2015 at 9:14pm
Me too. Which is why I'm having a hard time believing it was deliberate.
Me too. Let's start by not being so eager to dehumanize the enemy. The article on palsolidarity.org (the only Web site to report the story as far as I can find) does not say that the soldier "saw her, took aim and fired". Maybe there was a rogue Israeli soldier who deliberately shot a three year old, but he would be the exception, not the rule. In the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, it seems much more likely to me that this was a stray bullet. ------------- Addeenul �Aql � Religion is intellect. |
TG12345 wrote:Posted By: TG12345
Date Posted: 26 September 2015 at 4:47am
Have you ever been to the West Bank? I have, and three times. I have seen soldiers shoot Palestinian kids who were throwing rocks. I have also seen them falsely arrest kids who weren't doing anything, like this summer in Hebron when some school age kids playing soccer at night were almost arrested after a soldier claimed they were throwing rocks at him. Fortunately, a Palestinian man with a camera was there, and what was on film was the soldier throwing rocks at the kids and trying to provoke them. When tha didn't work, he tried to get them arrested. Due to our presence and the video, his commander did not arrest the kids, but the soldier was not disciplined also.
How would a stray bullet hit someone in a balcony who is nowhere near the stone throwers and above them? I have been to that village also and have seen the houses there, to shoot her the soldier must have aimed upwards. During the clashes, people throw rocks from the street or the road, not from the houses. |
Posted By: Ron Webb
Date Posted: 26 September 2015 at 9:02am
Yes, I know. I have read your reports on this forum, and I admire the work that you are doing. If you had actually been a witness to this incident, I would believe you.
Yup, I totally believe that.
Do you have the video by any chance? I'd like to see it. Anyway, IMHO there is still a considerable moral distance between those sorts of things and deliberately shooting a three year old girl in the face.
I don't know. Possibly a bullet ricocheted. Possibly the girl wasn't actually on the balcony. Possibly the intended target was her father, who perhaps was shooting from the balcony. It does seem an odd coincidence that it happened to be the daughter of the Nablus police chief who was shot. There are now several similar sites reporting the incident (e.g. http://palestineinsight.net/category/abd-al-latif-al-qaddumi/ - http://palestineinsight.net ), in which Fatah leader Morad Eshteiwy claims that Israeli forces directly shot her. They don't say whether Eshteiwy witnessed the incident himself. Sorry, but I'm still finding it easier to believe that a Fatah leader would make up a story like this to discredit the Israeli soldiers, than that an Israeli soldier would deliberately shoot a three year old girl in the face. I know Israelis do a lot of terrible things, but I also know that false accusations are commonplace in conflicts like this. IMHO the real atrocity here is the very fact that we have an Israeli tank driving down a Palestinian street spraying sewage at houses and people, as shown in http://www.imemc.org/article/73151 - this video . I can hardly think of anything more disgusting or dehumanizing, or more provocative, or less likely to lead to peace, than that. ------------- Addeenul �Aql � Religion is intellect. |
Posted By: TG12345
Date Posted: 27 September 2015 at 11:55am
Thanks for your kind words. I can tell you though that having seen what I've seen happening there, this is a story that sadly is not at all unbelievable.
So shooting kids for them is not really a taboo, even if these kids are too far away to do any damage to them.
I don't have the video, the man's neighbour showed it to the commander. After the boys were released, he agreed to not show the video.
Off what? The balcony was above them.
The people who wrote the ISM report stated she did. In the reports, we are always very careful to report what happened and to be accurate.
If the guy was shooting a gun at the soldiers, they would have responded with live ammunition, not rubber bullets. It also would have been reported in an Israeli newspaper somewhere by now that Palestinians were shooting a gun at Israeli soldiers. Also, during the clashes at the village (I have witnessed 3 of them, believe me they are a terrible thing to see), people don't throw rocks from houses. I don't defend Fatah or like them, but I see no reason to believe why he would have been shooting at the soldiers from a balcony.
Unfortunately, the "skunk" (nickname for this weapon) is nothing new. It is used all across the West Bank, and as you pointed out, used not only against rock throwers but also it sprays this s*** at people's homes. Last month, in an act of collective punishment for the village's defiance, the soldiers destroyed their water pipe with a bulldozer. http://palsolidarity.org/2015/08/israeli-forces-punish-kafr-qaddum-by-damaging-the-water-supply-system/ |
Posted By: Ron Webb
Date Posted: 27 September 2015 at 6:08pm
It's not okay, but it's understandable. You're scared and stressed and hot and miserable, surrounded by people who hate you, in the midst of a conflict that makes no sense at all; then on top of all that, these kids are throwing stones at you, maybe ineffectually but you may not be thinking too rationally about that. All you know is that they are trying to hurt you, and your instinct is to answer aggression with aggression. And you know what they say: if all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well, all the soldier's got is a gun... Not that I'm excusing either behaviour, but IMHO shooting at a three year old girl standing on a balcony is in a whole 'nother league. That is pure cold-blooded evil. If you can easily believe that a typical Israeli soldier is capable of that, then in your own mind you have already dehumanized the enemy.
The way I read the report, the statement is from Eshteiwy. I wonder if he was an eyewitness; and if so, I wonder why he would allow his daughter on the balcony while there are soldiers shooting in the streets below.
The report indicates that live rounds were used, in addition to rubber bullets etc.
Maybe it was. Have you looked? I tried searching for it, but I'm not sure whether the incident occurred on Friday, Sept. 25, or on the previous Friday, Sept. 18. I did find a lot of violent incidents reported in the Nablus region, just in the last couple of weeks. Maybe the media don't even regard it as particularly newsworthy anymore. Or maybe the soldier, having accidentally shot a three-year old in the face, thought it prudent just to keep his mouth shut about the whole thing. That's probably what I would do.
I see no reason why an Israeli soldier would deliberately shoot a three year old kid either, but anything is possible I guess. Certainly if a foreign army came down my street spraying you-know-what and firing rubber bullets at kids, and if as police chief I had a gun on my hip, I'd be sorely tempted. === I guess my main message here is that if you want to convince people like me (not that I need much convincing to begin with) of who the real aggressor is, and which side the world's condemnation needs to focus on, I would concentrate my message on the skunks and the destruction of the water supply and similar acts. With stories of casualties or body counts or missile attacks or the like, it's too easy to get into questions of who fired the first shot and whether it was in self-defence or whatever; but videos like the one I saw are irrefutable evidence of moral degradation and pure purposeless depravity. They should be played on nightly newscasts all over North America. Then maybe something might change. Or not. I must confess I'm losing hope.  ------------- Addeenul �Aql � Religion is intellect. |
Posted By: Demmzy15
Date Posted: 28 September 2015 at 4:48am
| So sad, may Allah have mercy on the Palestinians! |
Posted By: ISLAM HASHTAG
Date Posted: 07 October 2015 at 10:44am
| May Allah help the Palestinians. |
Posted By: Caringheart
Date Posted: 20 October 2015 at 10:53am
 ------------- Let us seek Truth together Blessed be God forever "I believe in Jesus as I believe in the sun... not because I see it, but because by it, I see everything else.: - C.S.Lewis |
Posted By: Caringheart
Date Posted: 20 October 2015 at 10:56am
------------- Let us seek Truth together Blessed be God forever "I believe in Jesus as I believe in the sun... not because I see it, but because by it, I see everything else.: - C.S.Lewis |