Video shows vehicle carrying dead man’s body along by his clothes after he was shot by Israeli army in southern Gaza
Israeli forces shot dead one Palestinian near the Gaza border on Sunday, then extracted his body with a bulldozer in a video that has sparked outrage.
The army said it opened fire on two Palestinian men suspected of placing a bomb next to the fence separating the besieged enclave from Israel in the southern Gaza Strip.
“Following the successful thwarting of the attack near the Gaza Strip fence earlier this morning, an IDF [Israeli army] bulldozer extracted the body of one of the attackers,” a military spokeswoman told AFP.
Footage widely shared and condemned by Palestinians and others on social media showed an Israeli army bulldozer, escorted by a Merkava battle tank, confronting young men who tried to evacuate the wounded. The bulldozer is then seen carrying a dead man’s body along by his clothes.
The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza confirmed that two men were transferred to the European hospital in Khan Yunis. One of them had been shot in his legs, it said.
مشهد مؤلم جدا اثناء سحب جثمان الشهيد شرق خانيونس جنوب قطاع غزة. تصوير مثنى النجار
Posted by Al Hadath صحيفة الحدث on Saturday, February 22, 2020
Islamic Jihad, a militant group in Gaza, said in a statement on Sunday that the dead man was one of its members.
“Mohamed Ali Al-Naem, 27, has been martyred in the Israeli crime,” a statement said. The group vowed retaliation.
Fawzi Barhoum, the spokesman for the Hamas movement that governs the Gaza Strip, said the man who was killed was unarmed.
“Desecrating the dead body of a young unarmed man on the borders of the Gaza Strip in front of the cameras of the whole world is a heinous crime that adds to the occupation’s list of crimes against our Palestinian people,” he said in a statement.
Israeli-Palestinian tensions have increased since 28 January when US President Donald Trump released his vision for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – a plan firmly rejected by the Palestinian leadership in both the occupied West Bank and Gaza who described it as “a gift” to Israel.
