Israeli forces shot a two-year-old girl in the head in her West Bank home on Saturday while she was eating dinner with her family, according to health officials and family members.
The Palestinian Health Ministry says Laila Muhammad Al-Khatib was shot dead during an Israeli military raid on the village of Ash-Shuhada, just south of Jenin.
“They started to shoot at us through the windows without any warning,” Ghada Asous, the toddler’s grandmother, said. “All of a sudden, the special forces raided us and were shooting through the windows.”
Media reports say the girl’s pregnant mother also sustained light injuries. Images from the scene showed bullet holes in the home’s windows.
A funeral was held on Sunday.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) say troops on a counterterrorism operation had fired at a structure where suspected militants had barricaded themselves. It said in a statement that it was reviewing reports that uninvolved civilians were injured.
Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director with Human Rights Watch, told CBC News the group has documented a wide range of unlawful killings of children and other civilians in the West Bank.
“In this particular case, it speaks to a pattern of such a reckless disregard for Palestinian life that bystanders and others are often regularly caught up in the killings,” he said.
Israeli forces killed at least nine Palestinians in the occupied West Bank in a major operation Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said is intended to ‘defeat terrorism.’ It’s sparking fears the paused Gaza war will be resumed there.
Shakir says the recent escalation of Israeli military violence in the West Bank has been “dramatic” and “alarming.”
An Israeli airstrike killed two Palestinian militants in the city of Tulkarm on Monday, according to Hamas and Israeli military officials.
In Jenin, further north, a major operation with hundreds of Israeli troops backed by armoured vehicles, drones and helicopters, looked set to go into a second week, with smoke rising above the refugee camp adjacent to the city.
The raid in Jenin, which is seen as a hub for Palestinian resistance groups, started the day after a ceasefire took effect in the Gaza Strip.
Armoured bulldozers and diggers have destroyed buildings and roads in the camp — a crowded township built for descendants of Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes in the 1948 war amid the creation of Israel. Thousands of people have left their homes.
At least 16 Palestinians have been killed in Jenin and surrounding areas since the start of the operation a week ago, including four claimed as fighters by Hamas and the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad.
The International Court of Justice in The Hague said in July that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank violates international law, writing in a non-binding advisory opinion that Israel should end its presence in occupied Palestinian territories as rapidly as possible. Israel has rejected the findings.
