Israeli forces fatally shot and killed a Palestinian woman at the Arroub refugee camp in Israel Occupied West Bank. Ghufran Hamed Warasneh, 31, was shot at the entrance to the camp while leaving home for work.
She had started a job at radio station three days prior to being killed, reported Aljazeera.
The Israeli army claimed in a statement that “an assailant armed with a knife advanced toward an IDF [Israeli army] soldier who was conducting routine security activity”. However, witnesses tell a different story. In their view Warasneh posed little threat to the armed Israeli soldiers, and that the knife was small.
Warasneh was shot just before 8am at the entrance to the camp, which is located between Bethlehem and Hebron, and where Israeli soldiers are permanently stationed.
The Palestinian foreign ministry condemned the killing as a “field execution”.
“She was en route to her work and there were no incidents there or danger to the criminals,” it said in a statement.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said that Israeli forces had blocked its medics from reaching Warasneh for 20 minutes before allowing them to transfer her to al-Ahli hospital, in the nearby Palestinian city of Hebron, where she was pronounced dead.
Doctors at the hospital said the bullet she was shot with had pierced her heart.
Warasneh was a former prisoner and released from jail at the start of April 2022 after spending three months in prison, the Palestinian Prisoners Society said in a statement mourning her killing.
