GAZA CITY, 20 November — Israeli troops assassinated three Palestinians yesterday. Two of them had been arrested Sunday night in the northern Gaza Strip, Brig. Abdel Razaq El Majaydar, Palestinian public security chief, said.
El Majaydar told reporters that four Palestinian police officers were injured by Israeli shrapnel Sunday night two kilometers south of the Israeli settlement of Dugit in northern Gaza Strip, but two of them were arrested and then killed. “The Israeli troops shot them to death in cold blood, and then drove armored personnel carriers over their bodies,” he said. “It is another awful crime and execution without a trial.”
The two officers, identified as Lt. Medhat Abu Dalal 32, and his deputy Muhammad Hussein, 25, were killed and their bodies were handed over yesterday morning to the Palestinian Authority.
El Majaydar said the injured had been members of the Palestinian naval police who were on ground patrol in northern Gaza, checking police posts and checkpoints. They also worked as guards of the nearby American elementary school.
Medical sources at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City said that two bodies of the police officers were barely recognizable, adding that they had shrapnel injuries to their legs, bullet injuries all over their bodies, and they were mutilated.
“The hospital had previously received many cases of Palestinians killed by shells fired directly at them. But the two the hospital received today were not killed by shells, they were shot and then the bodies were tortured,” the sources said.
In a separate incident, Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian man Maher Fareq Daghlas, 20, who was a member of the Palestinian Preventive Security Service.
Three Israeli tanks rolled more than a kilometer into the self-ruled Palestinian town of Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip yesterday.
The tanks entered a farming area in the town near the Erez border crossing without any provocation and sparked exchanges of gunfire, but no injuries have been reported, the Palestinian officials said.
In another development, Israeli Army kidnapped a senior member of the Hamas yesterday in a raid on his home in the Gaza Strip. “The Jews came and kidnapped him,” his brother said, declining to elaborate further or describe the operation.
Abed Rabbo Abu Khoussa’s family said Israeli forces took him from his home in the Shijjaia neighborhood.
