A Palestinian man in a red cap walks down the narrow alleyway in Nablus’s old city towards a group of Israeli soldiers, clearly unarmed.He attempts to talk to the soldiers, who had flooded into the occupied West Bank city in the early hours of Tuesday as part of Israel’s latest military raid – believed to be the largest carried out in Nablus in two years.
The soldiers immediately kick and shove the man – 40-year-old Nidal Umairah – before his brother walks over, attempting to intervene. Gunfire follows, and soon the two brothers are lying dead.
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Nidal and his brother 35-year-old brother Khaled were the latest victims of Israel in the West Bank, after they were killed late on Tuesday. It is unclear which brother had initially been detained, but witnesses were adamant that the behaviour of the Israeli soldiers was an unnecessary escalation that led to the deaths of yet more Palestinians.
Ghassan Hamdan, the director of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society in Nablus, was at the scene of the killings. Advertisement
“There were at least 12 soldiers and they all fired their automatic machine guns at once,” said Hamdan.
After the two men fell to the ground [medics] asked the soldiers if we could treat their wounds. They answered by firing at all of us.”
“We all took cover behind the walls of the old city,” he told Al Jazeera.
Hamza Abu Hajar, a paramedic at the scene, said that the Umairah brother who had initially approached the Israeli soldiers had been trying to go to his house to move his family out and away from the Israeli raid.
“They lifted his shirt up to p …
