Israelis ‘cold-bloodedly’ killing Palestinians in occupied West Bank | Occupied West Bank

On October 19, Sarah Mahamid watched helplessly from a window as Israeli security forces shot and killed her younger brother.

Taha, 15, had been playing with a friend outside her home in the occupied West Bank town of Tulkarem.

The 19-year-old screamed as her brother fell to the ground.

Her father, Ibrahim, ran out the front door to get his son, but a sniper shot him too.

“I remember my father shouting that Taha might still be alive… but I knew that Taha had been martyred. I knew he was dead,” Sarah told Al Jazeera.

Taha was killed instantly. Ibrahim fought for his life in the intensive care unit for five months until he too died.

Al Jazeera footage shows Taha and Ibrahim were both unarmed and posed no threat.

“My other brother ran after my father out the door to stop him. He saw that Taha was dead and he saw my father shot.

“It appeared as if steam or smoke was rising from my father’s body when the bullets hit him.”

Unlawful, arbitrary killings

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), nearly 1,500 Palestinians have been unlawfully killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank over the past 16 years – 98 percent of them civilians. Each of them, like Taha and Ibrahim, has a story and loved ones who mourn them.

The frequency of killings has increased in recent years, with Israel killing 509 Palestinians in 2023. That’s more than double the number recorded by OCHA in any previous year.

According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), 131 Palestinians were killed in the first three months of this year, a higher killing rate than last year.

“Israel has been using lethal force against Palestinians for decades, … but it appears that the Israeli government is taking further steps in this regard,” said Omar Shakir, the Israel-Palestine director at HRW.

Israel says its operations in the West Bank are necessary for security reasons. The same rationale is also given for the attack on Gaza, in which 35,000 Palestinians were killed, in response to the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7, in which 1,139 people were killed.

The murders in the West Bank are carried out during house searches or during controls and harassment at Israeli checkpoints.

According to HRW, some Palestinian children were even killed on the way to school.

“(The Israelis) shoot people who do not pose an immediate threat to their lives. They also shoot at escapees and at injured people lying on the ground. Some of these trends have existed before, but it seems that these incidents are happening more frequently,” Shakir told Al Jazeera.

Shoot to kill

Israeli officials have for years advocated a “shoot to kill” policy, regardless of whether the Palestinians shot posed a threat. Israel has even allowed its army to fire at stone throwers and has distributed assault rifles to Israeli Jews living in illegal settlements in the West Bank.

Settlers killed 17-year-old Omar Abdel Ghani Hamid when they attacked his West Bank village on April 13. Omar was one of several young men who confronted the settlers to stop them from beating Palestinians and attacking their homes.

Omar’s father, Ahmed, said his son and his friends scared away the settlers even though they were not carrying weapons. However, one of the settlers returned with a pistol and shot Omar.

“The bullet passed through the right side of his head and exited to the left. He died instantly. Thank God he wasn’t in much pain,” Ahmed said.

Ahmed learned of Omar’s death through a WhatsApp group through which all villagers inform each other about settler attacks. Later that morning, his son was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Ahmed said he seeks justice, but Jewish Israelis are almost never held accountable by Israeli authorities.

From 2017 to 2021, less than 1 percent of all lawsuits filed by Palestinians against Israeli soldiers, including for extrajudicial killings, resulted in prosecution, Israeli human rights group Yesh Din said.

At the time, only three Israeli soldiers were convicted of killing Palestinians and received lenient sentences. Others were sentenced to perform “military community service” for killing Palestinians, it said.

“There is a culture in which Israeli units know they can commit serious abuses without being held accountable,” said HRW’s Shakir.

“Colonization of our minds”

Army raids and extrajudicial killings are part of a broader attempt to “instill fear and terror” among Palestinians in the West Bank, said Zaid Shuabi, an analyst and activist with the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq.

Ultimately, however, it has led to the formation of a new generation of armed groups, often founded by young people fed up with the occupation’s violations.

Israel’s response to this new wave of resistance is to target entire communities in order to destroy the morale of Palestinians, Shuabi said.

“They want to reshape the Palestinian mindset so that we shouldn’t even dare to resist. And if we do, we will pay a heavy price,” he told Al Jazeera.

“This is about intimidating us. They want to tear us down… and colonize our minds.”

Sarah believes this was the reason for the Israeli attack on her family. She said that while her father and brother bled to death in the street, Israeli soldiers entered their home.

The Israeli army then cut off the water and electricity to their house. At one point, one of the Israeli soldiers began hitting Sarah’s other brother with the butt of his rifle and telling him to keep quiet.

Just before the soldiers left, Sarah gathered her courage and asked why they were terrorizing her family.

“He said, ‘To scare you,'” Sarah told Al Jazeera. “I could not believe it. I wondered what was wrong with them.

“They killed my brother and my father just to scare me.”