JERUSALEM: The families of two Palestinian-American teenagers killed in separate but eerily similar incidents in the West Bank say investigators from the American Embassy have visited their homes to look into the shootings.
The launch of American probes into the killings of Mohammad Khdour and Tawfic Abdel Jabbar reflects what appears to be a lack of confidence in the Israeli justice system to properly investigate the cases. Rights groups have long said that Israeli investigations into killings of Palestinians rarely lead to prosecutions, and the State Department has previously called for an “expeditious and thorough” Israeli investigation into Abdel Jabbar’s killing.
Both shootings occurred as the Biden administration signals a desire to crack down on settler violence in the volatile territory.
Khdour, who was born in Hollywood, Florida, was shot last Saturday while driving with a cousin on a hillside in Biddu, the town just outside of Jerusalem where Khdour had lived since the age of 2, relatives said. Khdour was born in Hollywood, Florida.
Seeking some fresh air after studying, Khdour joined the cousin on a drive to the forested hillside where villagers often barbecued, his brother Hamed Khdour said.
In videos and photos taken before the shooting and seen by The Associated Press, the boys joked around, taking photos of each other for social media and eating chocolate-covered waffles.
The boys were returning to the village, Hamed said, when they heard gunfire. At least one shot came through the car window, hitting Mohammad squarely in the head.
Hamed said his cousin told the family that the shots came from a white Mitsubishi with an Israeli license plate parked on a road below the hill, a vehicle that villagers said they had seen before. Hamed said the car was across the security fence separating Biddu from Israeli territory. The cousin then managed to escape and run back to the village.
A video taken directly after the incident and seen by The Associated Press showed a group of men pulling a body out of the car, littered with shattered glass and stained with blood. Hamed said Mohammad was pronounced dead at a Ramallah hospital late Saturday night.
Ahmad Khdour, Mohammad’s father, said he did not know if Israel had begun investigating the case and had heard nothing from Israeli officials.
The Israeli military referred questions to the Shin Bet internal security service, which did not respond to requests for comment.
But US Embassy officials visited the home and the scene of the shooting Thursday, taking pictures of the car Khdour was driving and the scene around it, Mohammad’s father said. He said the officials told the family they are preparing a report on the incident.
The US Office of Palestinian Affairs wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that it was “devastated” by the killing and called for “a quick, thorough, and transparent investigation, including full accountability.”
Khdour lived in Biddu with his mother and four brothers. He hoped to go back to the US to study law once he finished his final year of high school, Hamed said.
“Mohammad was a simple kid, like any other kid. He had dreams. He loved cars,” said Hamed. “He never fought with anyone. Everyone liked him.”
The shooting came nearly a month after the killing of Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, also a 17-year-old Palestinian-American shot while driving down a dirt road close to his village in the northern West Bank.
The sole passenger in the vehicle said the shooting was unprovoked, describing apparent Israeli fire hitting the back of the vehicle before it overturned several times. The incident prompted an expression of concern from the White House and an uncommonly quick pledge from the Israeli police to investigate.
But Israeli police have still not released any new findings in the case.
A video shared with the AP by Abdel Jabbar’s father raised new questions of the police’s original theory, which never mentioned that the teen had been shot while driving.
Instead, the police said that a civilian, an off-duty police officer and a soldier had targeted people “purportedly engaged in rock-throwing activities” along a main West Bank thoroughfare.
The video, which the father said was taken moments after the shooting, shows two Israeli soldiers standing about 20 meters (yards) from the vehicle, guns cocked — indicating that soldiers were in the vicinity that day.
Abdel Jabbar’s father said that Israeli investigators took the vehicle into custody for under a week before returning it.
He said that last week that US Embassy investigators collected medical and legal reports issued by the Ramallah prosecutor’s office and the hospital that treated Abdel Jabbar. The reports indicated that the cause of Tawfic’s death was a gunshot wound to the right side of the head.
Tawfic was from Gretna, Louisiana, and had been in the West Bank for under a year. Like Khdour, he was planning to return to the US for college.
In an unrelated incident, Israel arrested a 46-year-old Palestinian-American woman, also from Gretna, last week for alleged incitement in posts on social media. The woman’s family says it has not seen or heard from her since.
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said a week ago that he was “confident” that Ambassador Jack Lew was looking into Samaher Esmail’s case, as well as a circumstances around the detention of two Palestinian-Americans in Gaza that Israel says are affiliated with Hamas.
“Obviously, this is the kind of thing we take very seriously, so we’ll be talking to our Israeli counterparts and trying to get information, more context here about what happened,” he said.
The deaths come as violence surges across the occupied territory. Since the shock attack by Hamas militants on Oct. 7 from Gaza into southern Israel, Israel has also held the West Bank in a tight grip.
Biden’s administration has provided military and diplomatic support for Israel’s war against Hamas. Still, the administration has condemned rising violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank, most recently releasing sanctions targeting four settlers.
Since Oct. 7, 395 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli fire, according to Palestinian health officials. Most have been killed in clashes during near nightly Israeli army raids aimed at suspected militants.
US investigators visit homes of two Palestinian-American teens killed in the West Bank
https://arab.news/pmrva
US investigators visit homes of two Palestinian-American teens killed in the West Bank
- Rights groups have long said that Israeli investigations into killings of Palestinians rarely lead to prosecutions
- The State Department has previously called for an “expeditious and thorough” Israeli investigation into Abdel Jabbar’s killing
Sudan’s military accepts UN proposal of a weeklong ceasefire in El Fasher for aid distribution
- Sudan plunged into war in April 2023 when simmering tensions between the Sudanese army and the rival RSF escalated into battles
- The war has also driven more than 14 million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine
UN Secretary-General António Guterres called Sudanese military leader Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan and asked him for the humanitarian truce in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur province, to allow aid delivery.
Burhan agreed to the proposal and stressed the importance of implementing relevant UN Security Council resolutions, but it’s unknown whether the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces would agree and comply with the ceasefire.
“We are making contacts with both sides with that objective, and that was the fundamental reason for that phone contact. We have a dramatic situation in El Fasher,” Guterres told reporters on Friday.
No further details were revealed about the specifics of the ceasefire, including when it could go into effect.
Sudan plunged into war in April 2023 when simmering tensions between the Sudanese army and the rival RSF escalated into battles in the capital, Khartoum, and spread across the country, killing more than 20,000 people.
The war has also driven more than 14 million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine. UNICEF said earlier this year that an estimated 61,800 children have been internally displaced since the war began.
Guterres said on Friday that a humanitarian truce is needed for effective aid distribution, and it must be agreed upon several days in advance to prepare for a large-scale delivery in the El Fasher area, which has seen repeated waves of violence recently.
El-Fasher, more than 800 kilometers southwest of Khartoum, is under the control of the military. The RSF has been trying to capture El Fasher for a year to solidify its control over the entire Darfur region. The paramilitary’s attempts included launching repeated attacks on the city and two major famine-stricken displacement camps on its outskirts.
Trump hopeful for Gaza ceasefire, possibly ‘next week’
- United Nations officials on Friday said the GHF system was leading to mass killings of people seeking aid, drawing accusations from Israel that the UN was “aligning itself with Hamas”
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump voiced optimism Friday about a new ceasefire in Gaza, as criticism grew over mounting civilian deaths at Israeli-backed food distribution centers in the territory.
Asked by reporters how close a ceasefire was between Israel and Hamas, Trump said: “We think within the next week, we’re going to get a ceasefire.”
The United States brokered a ceasefire in the devastating conflict in the waning days of former president Joe Biden’s administration, with support from Trump’s incoming team.
Israel broke the ceasefire in March, launching new devastating attacks on Hamas, which attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.
Israel also stopped all food and other supplies from entering Gaza for more than two months, drawing warnings of famine.
Israel has since allowed a resumption of food through the controversial US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which involves US security contractors with Israeli troops at the periphery.
United Nations officials on Friday said the GHF system was leading to mass killings of people seeking aid, drawing accusations from Israel that the UN was “aligning itself with Hamas.”
Eyewitnesses and local officials have reported repeated killings of Palestinians at distribution centers over recent weeks in the war-stricken territory, where Israeli forces are battling Hamas militants.
The Israeli military has denied targeting people and GHF has denied any deadly incidents were linked to its sites.
But following weeks of reports, UN officials and other aid providers on Friday denounced what they said was a wave of killings of hungry people seeking aid.
“The new aid distribution system has become a killing field,” with people “shot at while trying to access food for themselves and their families,” said Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian affairs (UNWRA).
“This abomination must end through a return to humanitarian deliveries from the UN including @UNRWA,” he wrote on X.
The health ministry in the Hamas-controlled territory says that since late May, more than 500 people have been killed near aid centers while seeking scarce supplies.
The country’s civil defense agency has also repeatedly reported people being killed while seeking aid.
“People are being killed simply trying to feed themselves and their families,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
“The search for food must never be a death sentence.”
Medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) branded the GHF relief effort “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid.”
That drew an angry response from Israel, which said GHF had provided 46 million meals in Gaza.
“The UN is doing everything it can to oppose this effort. In doing so, the UN is aligning itself with Hamas, which is also trying to sabotage the GHF’s humanitarian operations,” the foreign ministry said.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a report in left-leaning daily Haaretz that military commanders had ordered troops to shoot at crowds near aid distribution sites to disperse them even when they posed no threat.
Haaretz said the military advocate general, the army’s top legal authority, had instructed the military to investigate “suspected war crimes” at aid sites.
The Israeli military declined to comment to AFP on the claim.
Netanyahu said in a joint statement with Defense Minister Israel Katz that their country “absolutely rejects the contemptible blood libels” and “malicious falsehoods” in the Haaretz article.
Gaza’s civil defense agency told AFP 80 Palestinians had been killed on Friday by Israeli strikes or fire across the Palestinian territory, including 10 who were waiting for aid.
The Israeli military told AFP it was looking into the incidents, and denied its troops fired in one of the locations in central Gaza where rescuers said one aid seeker was killed.
Civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP six people were killed in southern Gaza near one of the distribution sites operated by GHF, and one more in a separate incident in the center of the territory, where the army denied shooting “at all.”
Another three people were killed by a strike while waiting for aid southwest of Gaza City, Bassal said.
Elsewhere, eight people were killed “after an Israeli air strike hit Osama Bin Zaid School, which was housing displaced persons” in northern Gaza.
Meanwhile, Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, said they shelled an Israeli vehicle east of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza on Friday.
The Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas-ally Palestinian Islamic Jihad, said they attacked Israeli soldiers in at least two other locations near Khan Yunis in coordination with the Al-Qassam Brigades.
Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that sparked the Gaza war resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 56,331 people, also mostly civilians, according to Gaza’s health ministry. The United Nations considers its figures reliable.
Child laborers among 19 dead in Egypt road accident: state media
- Most of the victims were teenage girls working as day laborers
CAIRO: A road accident in northern Egypt killed 19 people on Friday, most of them teenage girls working as day laborers, state media reported.
A truck collided with the minibus carrying the laborers to their place of work from their home village of Kafr Al-Sanabsa in the Nile Delta, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Cairo, state-owned newspaper Akhbar Al-Youm reported.
According to a list of the names and ages of the dead published by another state-owned daily, Al-Ahram, most of the workers were teenagers — two of them just 14.
Egyptian media dubbed the girls “martyrs for their daily bread.”
Road accidents are common in Egypt, where traffic rules are unevenly enforced and many roads are in poor repair.
Accidents often involve underage laborers traveling to work in overcrowded minibuses in rural areas.
At least 1.3 million minors are engaged in some form of child labor in Egypt, according to official figures.
UN peacekeeping chief ‘very, very worried’ about future of Lebanon-Israel ceasefire deal if UNIFIL withdraws
- Jean Pierre Lacroix tells Arab News Resolution 1701, governing peace between the nations, would be at risk if the UN Interim Force in Lebanon was no longer deployed
- Lebanese authorities back UNIFIL and want its mandate extended, but the mission faces financial pressures and the Security Council will review it in August
NEW YORK CITY: The future of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which governs the ceasefire and peacekeeping framework between Lebanon and Israel, would be at risk without the continuing presence of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, the UN’s top peacekeeper warned on Thursday.
Jean Pierre Lacroix, the organization’s head of peacekeeping operations, expressed his deep concern during a press conference following visits to Lebanon and Syria. He told Arab News he would be “very, very worried” about the future of the resolution if UNIFIL was withdrawn.
“UNIFIL is not an end in itself, and UNIFIL is not something standalone,” he said. “It’s a tool for supporting implementation of Resolution 1701, so the two are inextricably linked.
“I would be very, very worried about the future of Resolution 1701 if there is no UNIFIL on the ground to support the implementation of that resolution.”
UNIFIL, established in 2006 to monitor the ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel and prevent hostilities in Lebanon’s volatile southern border region, continues to play a crucial role in providing support for the Lebanese army presence in areas south of the Litani River.
The peacekeepers assist in tasks such as mine clearance and rehabilitation efforts, serve as liaisons between Lebanese and Israeli forces, and help with deconfliction efforts.
Despite progress in enforcing the provisions of the resolution, Lacroix said that violations persist and more work is needed to ensure it is fully implemented.
During his trip, Lacroix met senior Lebanese officials, including President Joseph Aoun, the prime minister, the speaker of the parliament, and the commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces. All of them, he said, reiterated the critical need for UNIFIL to maintain its presence in the country, and Lebanese authorities have formally asked the Security Council to extend the mission’s mandate.
However, UNIFIL faces severe financial constraints. Lacroix said contingency planning is underway amid liquidity shortfalls and uncertainties about the funding commitments of UN member states, particularly in light of potential US opposition to extension of the mandate.
“To the best of my knowledge, there is no final position expressed by Israel or the United States,” he said in response to reports of possible opposition to the continued deployment of UNIFIL. “But we expect consistency from member states; they give mandates and then are expected to pay on time and in full.”
Lacroix stressed that in the absence of UNIFIL, practical and symbolic support for Resolution 1701 would erode, potentially escalating tensions in a region where stability remains fragile.
“The interlocutors in Lebanon were concerned and expressed the need for UNIFIL’s presence to help mitigate and reduce tensions that remain quite high in the region,” he said.
The Security Council is scheduled to review UNIFIL’s mandate in August. The mission currently comprises about 10,000 troops from more than 40 countries.
62 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces, say Gaza rescuers
- Medical charity deplores ‘slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid’ amid hunger crisis
GAZA CITY: Gaza’s civil defense agency said that Israeli forces killed at least 62 people on Friday, including 10 who were waiting for aid in the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.
The reported killing of people seeking aid marks the latest in a string of deadly incidents near aid sites in Gaza, where a US- and Israeli-backed foundation has largely replaced established humanitarian organizations.
Civil defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said that 62 Palestinians had been killed on Friday by Israeli strikes or fire across the Palestinian territory.
When asked for comment, the Israeli military said it was looking into the incidents, and denied its troops fired in one of the locations in central Gaza where rescuers said one aid seeker was killed.
People are being killed simply trying to feed themselves and their families. The search for food must never be a death sentence.
Antonio Guterres, UN secretary-general
Bassal said that six people were killed in southern Gaza near one of the distribution sites operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and one more in a separate incident in the center of the territory, where the army denied shooting “at all.”
Another three people were killed by a strike while waiting for aid southwest of Gaza City, Bassal said.
The Health Ministry in the territory says that since late May, more than 500 people have been killed near aid centers while seeking scarce supplies.
GHF has denied that fatal shootings have occurred in the immediate vicinity of its aid points.
Medical charity Doctors Without Borders, or MSF on Friday slammed the GHF relief effort, calling it “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid.”
It noted that in the week of June 8, shortly after GHF opened a distribution site in central Gaza’s Netzarim corridor, the MSF field hospital in nearby Deir Al-Balah saw a 190 percent increase in bullet wound cases compared to the previous week.
Aitor Zabalgogeaskoa, MSF emergency coordinator in Gaza, said in a statement that, under how the distribution centers currently operate: “If people arrive early and approach the checkpoints, they get shot.”
“If they arrive on time, but there is an overflow and they jump over the mounds and the wires, they get shot.”
“If they arrive late, they shouldn’t be there because it is an ‘evacuated zone’, they get shot,” he added.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the US-backed aid operation in Gaza is “inherently unsafe,” giving a blunt assessment: “It is killing people.”
He also said UN-led humanitarian efforts are being “strangled,” aid workers themselves are starving and Israel — as the occupying power — is required to agree to and facilitate aid deliveries into and throughout the Palestinian enclave.
“People are being killed simply trying to feed themselves and their families. The search for food must never be a death sentence,” Guterres said.
Meanwhile, Bassal said that 10 people were killed in five separate Israeli strikes near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, east of which he said “continuous Israeli artillery shelling” was reported on Friday.
Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, said they shelled an Israeli vehicle east of Khan Younis on Friday.
The Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, said they had attacked a group of Israeli soldiers north of Khan Younis in coordination with the Al-Qassam Brigades.
Bassal added that 30 people were killed in six separate strikes in northern Gaza on Friday, including a fisherman who was targeted “by Israeli warships.”
He specified that eight of them were killed “after an Israeli airstrike hit Osama Bin Zaid School, which was housing displaced people” in northern Gaza.
In central Gaza’s Al-Bureij refugee camp, 12 people were killed in two separate Israeli strikes, Bassal said.
The 50th medic from the Palestine Red Crescent has been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, the PRCS said on Friday in a statement.
Haitham Bassam Abu Issa, a nurse at the PRCS clinic in Deir Al-Balah in the center of the Gaza strip, was killed while off duty on Thursday, the PRCS said.
“This brings the total number of PRCS staff and volunteers killed during the conflict to 50 – a deeply shocking figure,” the PRCS said.
Israeli restrictions on media in the Gaza Strip and difficulties in accessing some areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify the tolls and details provided by rescuers and witnesses.
Israel’s military said it was continuing its operations in Gaza on Friday, after army chief Eyal Zamir announced earlier in the week that the focus would again shift to the territory.
The Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that sparked the Gaza war resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 56,331 people, mostly civilians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The UN considers its figures reliable.
