A forty-year-old Palestinian man was shot dead by an Israeli settler, the Palestinian Health Ministry in Ramallah stated on Monday.
“Citizen Bilal Muhammad Saleh (40 years old) was martyred by a bullet in the chest fired by a settler in the town of E-Sawiya Nablus district,” the ministry announced on its official Telegram channel.
According to subsequent reports from Israeli media sources, the incident occurred while the Palestinians were picking olives.
The reports place the scene of the incident in the area of the Palestinian town of E-Sawiya and the Israeli settlement of Rehelim.
There is less than a kilometer of space between these two communities. They’re separated by Highway 60 connecting Ramallah and Nablus.
"A self-defense shooting"
Yossi Dagan, the Head of the Samaria Regional Council, released a statement in the wake of the shooting claiming that the Palestinian was killed in an act of self-defense.
“This is a family that was attacked near their agricultural plot by dozens of Hamas members,” the council head claimed. “I completely support the warrior who fired," he added.
As Dagan explains the events, a Jewish family of Rehelim was patrolling their agricultural plot when they were assaulted by Palestinians who were throwing stones. One of the family members, an IDF soldier on leave for the weekend, shot and killed one of the Palestinians in response.
Other accounts suggest that the Palestinians had been harvesting their own olives at a time and manner that did not require previous coordination with the IDF.
Ynet reported that Dagan called for an immediate cessation of the Palestinian olive harvest in areas close to settlements, citing that such activities are used as a platform to unleash terrorism.”
A photo of the killed Palestinian shows a rock clutched in his hand. Another photo purports to show Saleh at a pro-Hamas rally.
IDF and police personnel did not arrive at the scene until after the confrontation had concluded.
Hamas’s West Bank branch responded to the shooting on their Telegram channel, hailing Saleh as a martyr who was killed “during the confrontations of the Al-Aqsa Flood battle.”