Family Outing in West Bank Ends in Hail of Israeli Gunfire

(It's getting so bad, the PR is, even the New York Times is starting to throw the settlers under the bus. When is the last time you saw a published article in the flagship propaganda outlet describe any Jewish person as an extremist or present the Palestinians as the victims?)

from the New York Times

Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.

On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.

They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.

As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire.

The Israeli police and military, in a joint statement Sunday morning, said that border police officers and soldiers, while on a mission in Tammun to arrest suspected terrorists, had “sensed danger” after a vehicle “accelerated towards” them and “responded by shooting.” They said the circumstances of the episode were being investigated.

The two accounts could not have been more contradictory. But one fact was undisputed: Mr. Bani Odeh, 37, his wife, Othman and Muhammad were all shot and killed.

The Israeli-occupied West Bank is under siege as it has not been in years, with extremist Israeli settlers terrorizing Palestinian villagers on hillsides and in valleys where they live near one another. The body count is rapidly piling up: Seven Palestinians have been killed so far this year, all but one of those since the war with Iran began on Feb. 28...

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