Israeli troops kill Palestinian child, wound 13

Associated Press

Transcribed from the clipping

“JERUSALEM (AP) — The 12th month of the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories began with the fatal shooting by Israeli soldiers of a 3-year-old Arab boy. Elsewhere in the occupied lands Wednesday, 13 Palestinians, most of them teenagers, were shot and wounded by troops.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s 10-member inner Cabinet debated PLO plans to declare an independent Palestinian state at the meeting of the governing Palestine National Council set to begin Saturday in Algeria. Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Shomron warned that any violence coinciding with the meeting will be crushed.

‘We are getting ready, deploying forces and issuing orders, to ensure one clear thing: attempts to violate public order and create mass riots … will be forcefully crushed from the very beginning,’ Rabin said on Israel army radio. Shomron said additional forces would be deployed in the occupied lands during the meeting.

In the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, public transportation was halted and shops closed on Wednesday in the latest strike against the Israeli occupation of the territories captured in the 1967 Middle East war. The strike marked the start of the 12th month of an uprising that began Dec. 8. and has claimed the lives of 310 Arabs and 11 Israelis.

Osama Mohammed Abu Ganima was one of the youngest victims. The 3-year-old was shot in the chest in Gaza City’s Shajaiya quarter on Wednesday when an army jeep was pelted with stones and troops responded with gunfire, an Arab reporter said. Officials at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital said the boy was dead on arrival.

Family members said Osama was playing nearby when the shooting occurred. In the same incident, a 12-year-old Arab was shot in the jaw and a 13-year-old shot in the leg, hospital officials said. Jewish settlers in the West Bank, meanwhile, demanded tougher action against Arab rioters after a 52-year-old woman was hit in the head by a stone.

She was hospitalized in serious condition. Witnesses said police and troops brought dogs to the site…”

Context added by this archive

Eleven weeks after a headline that gave a shot child an offence and no shooter, the same news agency leads with Israeli troops kill. The boy is named in the ninth paragraph: Osama Mohammed Abu Ganima, three years old, shot in the chest at Shajaiya, dead on arrival at Shifa. His family says he was playing nearby.

The running count in the copy is 310 Arabs and 11 Israelis in twelve months.

Cite this item

"Israeli troops kill Palestinian child, wound 13," The Courier, 10 November 1988. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1988-052. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1988-052