Fatah calls shooting of autistic man a ‘war crime’; Hamas warns of intifada

Palestinian factions are condemning the police shooting of Iyad Halak, an East Jerusalem man with autism who Israeli border cops said they believed was carrying a gun.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party denounces the shooting as a “war crime.”

It says it holds Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fully responsible for the “execution of a young disabled man.”

The Palestinian leadership demands that whoever shot the man be brought before the International Criminal Court.

“Today, Israeli Occupation Forces in East Jerusalem assassinated Iyad Khayri, 32 a disabled Palestinian,” Saeb Erekat, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, writes on Twitter.

The shooting is a “crime that will be met with impunity unless the world stops treating Israel as a state above the law,” he says.

Erekat adds the hashtags #PalestineWillBeFree and #ICantBreath — a reference to the killing of African-American George Floyd, who died after pleading for air as a white policeman knelt on neck, which has sparked riots in the United States.

Meanwhile, Hamas, the Islamist terror group that controls the Gaza Strip, says the shooting of Halak will “fuel our people’s revolution which will not stop until the occupier leaves all Palestinian territory.”

It warns of a new Palestinian intifada, or violent uprising.

— with AFP