In the West Bank, Not Even Ambulances Are Immune to Deadly Israeli Army Gunfire
A memorial poster for Mohammed Musa. The whole floor of the ambulance was awash in blood.
Gideon Levy and Alex Levac report in Haaretz
What happens in Gaza is not confined to Gaza. After the Israel Defense Forces killed an appalling number of medical personnel in the war – 326 members of the medical professions had already been killed as of the end of February, according to United Nations statistics – soldiers are not hesitating to open fire at ambulances in the West Bank, either. Apparently, if it’s permitted in the Gaza Strip, it’s equally permitted in the West Bank.
The fact that international law absolutely prohibits attacks on medical teams, deeming them out-and-out war crimes, did not prevent soldiers from shooting directly into an ambulance two weeks ago. The driver of the vehicle, which was taking two men who had been wounded by settlers’ gunfire to hospital, was killed. Here, you can’t tell a story about armed militants hiding in hospitals and ambulances – here Israel simply wants a war in the West Bank, like the one in Gaza. Shooting from a distance of hundreds of meters into an ambulance that is traveling with its siren wailing is a war crime. Period. It’s a safe guess that no one will be brought to trial for the act, however, certainly not by the State of Israel.
Mohammed Musa was a 48-year-old driving instructor, married and the father of four children, from the village of Krayot, southeast of Nablus. For the past three years, he was also a volunteer ambulance driver for the Red Crescent. The station in his villages serves a total of 12 communities, which have been the most brutalized by settlers in the West Bank since the war broke out. Between Krayot, Akraba, Jorish and Mughayir, hardly a day has gone by here during the past seven months without a pogrom.
Indeed, driving this week to Krayot, on roads that run through the checkpoints at the entrances to all the neighboring villages, was like entering a war zone. Skeletons of burnt-out cars stand by the roadside, scorched houses, torn phone lines dangling from poles, and all of this damage perpetrated shamefully by settlers. Fifteen people have been killed in these villages since the start of the war and more than 300 have been wounded, most of them by settlers, some by soldiers. Seventy villagers are still hospitalized, some in serious condition. This is pogrom territory, between the settlements of Eli and Esh Kadosh, on the way to the Shiloh Valley. Now the local ambulance driver has been added to the toll.
We visited the compact, amazingly well-kept Red Crescent station in Krayot in the past, with its first-aid equipment, treatment beds and medical instruments in spotlessly clean rooms. Overseeing the office is its director, Bashar Muammar, a 41-year-old single man who has devoted the past 20 years to the station, his life project. He too is a volunteer. He makes a living from the printing press he owns, but most of the time he’s here, providing first aid and keeping a thick log of all the crimes perpetrated by settlers and by the army against the Palestinians in his district.
Parked outside is the station’s lone ambulance, a polished new Peugeot van, in which the volunteer driver Musa was killed. Muammar was in the vehicle with him at the time. A video shows him weeping bitterly over the body of his friend, which is lying in the clinic to which he was rushed, bleeding. In another clip he’s seen kissing the face of the dead man. Before beginning his account of the events, Muammar shows us two rocks, which were thrown at his ambulance by settlers even before the war, he tells us, on the road between Akraba and Majdal. Settlers also shot at the ambulance five previous times, but without inflicting casualties.