Yet another merciless killing by Israel

The cruel shooting down by Israeli police of an unarmed autistic Palestinian man in annexed east Jerusalem is a hugely condemnable action that confirms repeated complaints about use of excessive force by Israeli security forces against innocent Palestinians.

An Israeli police statement conceded that there was no weapon found at the scene after the area was searched.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party has already denounced the killing as a “war crime.”

The Palestinian leadership’s demand that whoever killed the Iyad Halak, 32, should be brought before the International Criminal Court is valid considering the gravity of the crime.

Halak was actually heading to a nearby school for people with special needs.

The anger among Palestinians and all other peace-loving people is justified. “They killed him in cold blood,” Halak’s mother, Rana, told Israel’s Channel 12 TV.

The secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization Saeb Erekat condemned the incident on Twitter, saying: “Israeli Occupation Forces in East #Jerusalem assassinated Iyad Khayri, 32 a disabled Palestinian. A crime that will be met with impunity unless the world stops treating Israel as a state above the law &@IntlCrimCourt fulfils its mandate.”

As he put it, the world community should wake up and stop treating Israel as a state above the law.

Erekat had even added the hashtags #PalestineWillBeFree and #ICantBreath − a reference to African-American man George Floyd whose death while a policeman kneeled on his neck has sparked riots in the United States.

Palestinians and human rights groups have long been insisting that Israeli security forces are using excessive force in many cases, either by killing individuals who could have been arrested or using lethal force when their lives were not in danger.

The killing has prompted some pro-Palestinian activists on social media to compare the shooting to this week’s killing of George Floyd, a handcuffed black Minnesota man who pleaded for air as a white police officer pressed a knee on his neck. His death has set off violent protests across the US.

Repeated provocative actions by Israel have already been fuelling anger among peace-loving people across the globe.

Instead of joining the global community in the war against the deadly COVID-19 pandemic that has been claiming lives, Israel has been busy planning nefarious activities.

The occupation forces have pressed ahead with plans to annex large parts of the West Bank in line with US President Donald Trump’s Middle East plan, which strongly favours Israel and rightly rejected by the Palestinians.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been claiming that he plans on moving ahead with the plan in July.

The Palestinian Authority, which governs autonomous enclaves in the West Bank, has already made it clear that it is no longer bound by past agreements with Israel and the United States and is cutting off all ties, including longstanding security coordination, to protest against the annexation plan.

Trump’s plan is biased in favour of Israel as it would allow the occupation forces to annex all settlements as well as the strategic Jordan Valley.

It would give the Palestinians limited autonomy in several chunks of territory with a capital on the outskirts of occupied Jerusalem, and that too only if they meet nearly impossible conditions.

It should never be forgotten that under international law, settlements in all the Palestinian territories, including east Jerusalem, are illegal.