… then the next day after the funeral killed another
In the most inhumane way imaginable, Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank village of Beit Ummar shot dead an innocent 11 year old child, then attacked the same village during the day of the funeral, killing a young man. Just another day living under brutal military occupation, but one that you would never know about if you only followed Western mainstream media.
On Wednesday, an 11-year-old Palestinian boy named Mohammed Al-Alami was shot and critically wounded by Israeli occupation forces whilst sitting in the back seat of his parent’s car. The shooting, using live ammunition, occurred at the entrance to Beit Ummar village, close to the main city of al-Khalil (Hebron, in Hebrew) in the West Bank. Mohammed was quickly rushed to the hospital and was later declared dead, with a bullet injury inflicted to his chest. As usual, there has been no accountability for the soldier who shot little Mohammed, nor will there be.
The following day, as Muslims are required to have a quick burial, the funeral for Mohammed took place. One of the young men from the village, Shuakat Khaled Awad, who was pictured at Mohammed’s funeral just hours before, was also shot and killed. The 20-year-old’s murder came as Israeli occupation forces stormed the village provocatively coinciding with the funeral. Young men quickly ran to confront the Israeli military with stones and were shot at with live ammunition, causing at least 10 injuries, one of which was serious.
Also, that same day, Israeli occupation forces were caught on security cameras raiding the Ramallah office of ‘Defense of Children Palestine’, illegally stealing documents.
Brad Parker, a senior adviser for the NGO, said on Twitter:
“Israeli forces raided our @DCIPalestine main office in Ramallah today around 5 a.m., confiscating computers, laptops, and files concerning our Palestinian child detainee clients in the Israeli military courts. We were not informed of the reason for the raid.”
The day prior to this, Israeli forces shot dead an unarmed 41-year-old man, Shadi Salim, in the village of Beita, near Nablus. That makes it three innocent civilians killed in three days and there has been no critical coverage of these events in Western media outlets.
If Israelis are killed by Palestinians, whether they be soldiers or civilians, the Western corporate press is sure to cover it. In fact, most people working in Western press who have covered Israel-Palestine certainly know the names of all the Israeli soldiers taken captive by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. But other than on the rare occasions, like was the case immediately after the 11-day military assault on Gaza in May, we almost never hear the names of Palestinian children killed. Most all Western journalists working for Mainstream media organisations, even the ones based in Jerusalem, likely cannot name a single Palestinian child killed in the past months – but they can name kidnapped soldiers.
The fact of the matter is, in the Western mainstream media today, the large majority of journalists sent to cover Palestine-Israel are based in West Jerusalem. This half of Jerusalem is set up like a Western city, completely disconnected from reality, and the journalists sent there are rarely ever experts with any knowledge of the Arabic language. They are sent there to do the job of the establishment, stay in cushy apartments, and get their talking points from Israeli fixers, colleagues at their networks, and/or the internet.
When these journalists do enter the occupied territories, they have no grasp of what is actually going on around them and of course cannot communicate with most of the people living in the communities they visit. So it is no surprise that they so easily carry such biased takes and an amateurish level of knowledge on the very topics they cover. What is unforgivable, however, is that they act as the purveyors of truth on the conflict to the rest of the Western world, and despite having not the slightest clue what they are talking about, presenting themselves as authorities on the topic.
The distortion of facts on the ground in occupied Palestine is beyond disgusting and is an impediment to the works of real experts, analysts, historians and journalists who specialize in the field. It is often these wealthy pseudo-intellectual journalists who are perpetuating the narrative of Orientalism as it pertains to Palestine. However, they often believe that what they are doing is correct, when it is some of the most racist white-washing of an oppressive regime that is going on today.