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Soldiers kill wounded militant during patrol in Jenin
By Nir Hasson, Haaretz Correspondent
11/13/05 "Haaretz" -- -- Israel Defense Forces troops shot and
killed a Palestinian militant while he lay wounded in a yard in the
West Bank city of Jenin on Saturday, according to a military report
released Sunday.
According to the IDF investigation, paratroopers patrolling the
Jenin area on Saturday evening saw three Palestinians, two of whom
were armed, making their way to a checkpoint set up by other troops.
The soldiers shot at the armed men and wounded them, though they
were able to flee the area. One of the men evaded the troops while
the other, Shojua Bilawi, a wanted militant, hid in a nearby yard.
Soldiers found bloodstains and a Kalashnikov assault rifle, but
because they feared that Bilawi had another gun, they sent a sniffer
dog to locate him. The dog found Bilawi, wounded, in the yard.
According to the troops, the wanted man shouted and writhed around,
and because they feared that he was armed, they shot and killed him.
According to the IDF, Bilawi was a wanted Fatah militant with ties
to Islamic Jihad. Military sources said that he was involved in a
number of shooting incidents in the region, and that he had been
involved in the manufacturing of weapons.
The army claims that Bilawi was hiding behind a bush, some 15 meters
from the troops, and the soldiers could not tell if he was armed.
"There was a real fear that he would blink first and would open fire
on the troops," a source in the IDF Central Command said Sunday. An
investigation of the incident will continue, although military
sources say that the shooting was appropriate. According to the IDF
source, Saturday's incident is dissimilar to a past incident in
which soldiers seriously wounded a wanted militant known to be
unarmed.
In other activities in the vicinity of Jenin, IDF troops arrested
two Palestinians on Sunday afternoon, one of them a Hamas militant
and the other described as "wanted for questioning."
The IDF began easing a number of restrictions on the Palestinians on
Sunday. The entrance of 8,000 West Bank Palestinians into Israel was
authorized, as well as the employment of 1,000 Palestinians in the
Atarot industrial zone. Some 7,000 merchants from the West Bank will
be able to enter Israel, and 1,700 employees of international
organizations in the West Bank will be able to travel to Israel and
the Gaza Strip; some 2,000 workers and 1,000 merchants from Gaza
will be authorized to enter Israel.
On Sunday evening, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip fired a mortar
shell that landed adjacent to the Karni crossing on the Gaza-Israel
border. There were no casualties.
Shortly afterward, the IDF responded with artillery fire directed at
targets in the northern Gaza Strip. There were no reports of
Palestinian casualties as a result of the return IDF fire.
© Copyright 2005 Haaretz. All rights reserved
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