Dozens today suffocated as Israeli forces attacked a funeral procession in Beit Ummar town, north of the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, according to an activist. Mohammad Awad said that the heavily-armed soldiers sealed off the main entrance of the southern West Bank town as a funeral procession was approaching the entrance on its way to a local cemetery in Asida area, triggering confrontations. The soldiers showered the mourners and the pallbearers with volleys of tear gas canisters, causing dozens to suffocate and injuring two by rubber-coated steel bullets, one in the foot and the other in the lower back. Israeli severely restricts Palestinians’ freedom of movement within the occupied West Bank through a complex combination of approximately 500 fixed checkpoints, hundreds of flying checkpoints, settler-only roads, over 200 military bases and various other physical obstructions. Closures besides to other measures, taken under the guise of security, are intended to entrench Israel’s 56-year-old military occupation of the West Bank and its settler colonial project which it enforces with routine and frequently deadly violence against Palestinians.
Source: En – Palestine news & Information Agency – WAFA