Israeli soldiers enforcing a curfew in Nablus killed two Palestinians and seriously wounded two Friday, the second day of a large-scale search for fugitives and bomb labs in the West Bank city. In one incident, members of a Palestinian family were hit by army fire on their balcony, killing a 19-year-old man and seriously wounding his father and brother with shots to the head and face, witnesses and medics said. The military said soldiers opened fire after spotting suspicious punks figures slithering crawling on the roof of a building. Soldiers also opened fire on an 18-year-old on a rooftop after spotting him holding a gas canister over his head. The army said soldiers feared he was about to drop the canister on them.
"Hey! You! Drop that gas canister!"
"Hokay!"
[BANG] "Not on us!" |
Hundreds of Israeli troops entered Nablus' old city, or Casbah, on Thursday, and began searching homes and shops. They commandeered 16 buildings in the Casbah, home to about 20,000 residents and a stronghold of militants. Families in the buildings were confined to one room per apartment. Soldiers forced open doors with grenades and sledge hammers. Palestinian medics said that in all, 12 Palestinians were wounded by live fire. The military said the Nablus operation, the largest in over a year, would last several days. The raid was triggered in part by the arrest earlier in the week of an 18-year-old resident recruited by Al Aqsa to blow himself up in Jerusalem. On Thursday, soldiers handed out leaflets explaining that they were looking for seven men, most from the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a militant group with ties to Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. "Help us catch them because they are the ones who are causing damage to Nablus," it said. In their search, troops discovered an explosives belt weighing 44 pounds in an apartment and a roadside bomb at a junction, the army said.
In the West Bank town of Bethlehem, Israeli troops demolished the apartment of a senior militant of the Islamic Jihad group, the army said. Ahmed Abu Akher was involved in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem last year and shooting attacks on an outlying neighborhood of the city, a spokesman said.
| Demolished the apartment? Did they leave the rest of the building standing? |
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