Riots Continue in West Bank Over Palestinian Prisoner Cancer Death
Palestinian riots continued over the weekend in several areas of the West Bank in the wake of the cancer death of a Palestinian prisoner.
Palestinians clashed with Israel Defense Forces soldiers Saturday in the Gush Etzion area, also throwing rocks and firebombs at local Jewish settlements.
Also on Saturday, Israeli soldiers prevented Palestinians from igniting agricultural fields near the northern West Bank community of Yitzhar.
A soldier was hit and injured in the hand near the West Bank village of Bayt Liqya, located approximately five miles northwest of Jerusalem, where troops faced dozens of rioting men after Friday mosque prayers, Army Radio reported.
Similar riots erupted in Hebron and the Al Arub village north of the West Bank city. In the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Isawiya, dozens of Palestinians staged a riot amid burning tires. Three men were arrested there, the radio station reported.
On April 4, thousands attended in Hebron the funeral of Maisara Abu Hamdiyeh – a 64-year-old Hamas terrorist who died on April 2 from cancer in an Israeli hospital while serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison for recruiting another terrorist to carry out an attack on a Jerusalem café. The rioting began following the prisoner’s death.
The Palestinian Authority has blamed Israel for his death. Israel’s Health Ministry reported that the findings of an autopsy on his body revealed the cause of death as complications due to cancer.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
