4-year-old Palestinian boy shot dead in suspected clan fight

Child from Anata is taken by Red Crescent ambulance to checkpoint, transferred to Magen David Adom emergency service, as both teams try but fail to save his life

The town of Anata, with the Jerusalem neighborhood of Pisgat Zeev in the foreground. ( Mohamar Awad/Flash 90)
The town of Anata, with the Jerusalem neighborhood of Pisgat Zeev in the foreground. ( Mohamar Awad/Flash 90)

A 4-year-old Palestinian boy was fatally shot on Saturday night near East Jerusalem during what police suspect was a gunfight between local clans.

The boy was named by Channel 12 news as Yussaf Al-Khalabi, a resident of Anata, which is partially in the West Bank and partially in the Jerusalem municipality.

A Red Crescent ambulance team rushed the boy to the Shuafat checkpoint in East Jerusalem, where it met up with a Magen David Adom ambulance, hoping to get the boy to hospital for treatment.

However, despite efforts by both teams to save the boy’s life, the MDA’s medics were forced to declare him dead at the scene.

Israel Police said in a statement that it had opened an investigation into the incident, which happened in an area that is under Israeli administrative control.

An initial probe indicated “a quarrel broke out between clans that was accompanied by gunfire that injured the child,” the statement said.

Last month, Maryam al-Takrouri, 21, was killed by a stray bullet in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi Joz also after being caught in a firefight between two feuding families.

Last year, Rafif Qara’een, a 4 -year-old resident of the Issawiya neighborhood, was hit by an apparently stray bullet fired by an unknown shooter. She died a week later on June 1. A relative told the Ynet website at the time that the family had sat down to eat the traditional iftar meal held each night during the month of Ramadan fasting when a bullet suddenly hit her in the head.

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