The Israeli military suspended a soldier who was captured on video this month firing his rifle at protesters in the occupied West Bank. Video evidence showed that the soldier fired his weapon within seconds of a Palestinian boy’s collapsing to the ground with what proved to be a fatal gunshot wound.
As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on Wednesday, the suspended soldier, seen in video recorded by a CNN producer, was a member of a communications unit assigned to document the work of combat troops and border police deployed to contain a demonstration in the West Bank town of Beitunia, near Israel’s Ofer Prison, on May 15. The CNN video appeared to show that another shot was fired by a police officer who was standing near the soldier on a hillside above the protesters.
Just seconds after those shots were fired, the CNN camera panned to show demonstrators and medics in a frantic scramble to evacuate the wounded protester, 17-year-old Nadeem Siam Nawara, who died a short time later.
Another young man, Mohammad Mahmoud Odeh Salameh, 16, was shot and killed later the same afternoon in the same location. The boys were part of a protest on Nakba Day, an annual commemoration of what Palestinians call the “catastrophe” suffered by their community in 1948, when hundreds of thousands fled or were driven from their homes by Israeli forces fighting to establish a Jewish state.
Security-camera footage recorded throughout the demonstration from a nearby building appeared to show that neither of the boys was engaged in violence when he was shot, although witnesses said that both had hurled rocks in the direction of Israeli soldiers earlier that afternoon.
An Israeli security official who requested anonymity to comment on a continuing investigation told The Times that the soldier had been suspended from his position for firing his weapon without authorization. The official insisted, however, that the soldier had fired only plastic-coated bullets, not live ammunition.
Doctors who examined the boys before their burials reported that they were both killed by gunshots with bullets that had passed through their chests. Although witnesses confirmed that some plastic-coated bullets were fired at the protesters, others insisted that live ammunition was also used. Sarit Michaeli of the Israeli rights group B'Tselem, told The Guardian that plastic-coated bullets fired at the boys from either the hillside above the street, where the CNN camera was trained, or from a parking lot further away where there was a second group of soldiers, “would not penetrate their bodies.”
Rajai Abu Khalil, an emergency-room doctor who attempted to save the life of Nadeem, the boy who was hit within seconds of the shot fired by the suspended soldier, told the American journalist Ben Ehrenreich that he had no doubt that the boys were killed by live fire. “There were exit wounds,” the doctor recalled. When they opened Nadeem’s chest, he said, “his heart was just destroyed.”
Another witness who spoke to Mr. Ehrenreich was a Palestinian photojournalist, Samer Nazzal, who posted a series of images of Nadeem’s shooting on Facebook, along with his own account of the incident.