18-year-old boy brain dead after being shot in head
Incident occurred just hours after funeral of 10-year-old
Israel's army shot an 18-year-old Palestinian in the head in the West Bank town of Ni'ilin, just hours after the village buried a 10-year-old who had also been shot in the head by a soldier. Eyewitnesses said the 18-year-old, Ahmed Yousef Amirah, was shot at close range when a military jeep drove past and an officer fired three rubber bullets [typically, "plastic-coated steel bullets" - JFP] at him from within the vehicle.
It is the third incident this month in which Israel's military appears to have deliberately targeted a resident of Ni'ilin, where protests against Israel's West Bank barrier and violent clashes occur almost daily.
...
Ni'ilin's residents said Amirah was not participating in the fighting but standing outside a house watching from a distance. But a spokesman for Israel's border police said it was unclear who shot Amirah. However, the border police will not investigate. "It's not our responsibility to investigate things like that," the spokesman said.
...
But Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, said the use of excessive force against protesters was a breach of international law and the military's own policies. "In this situation, even so-called less lethal crowd control weapons such as rubber bullets and tear gas have strict limitations on their use. Rubber bullets can be lethal when fired from less than 40 metres away," said B'Tselem's communications director, Sarit Michaeli.
The military's excessive use of force in the village was exposed last week when B'Tselem published a video showing a soldier shooting, at close range, the foot of a Palestinian man, who was blindfolded and cuffed.