A friend recently asked in the ZNet forum system for some answers about why Israel killed Abd-el-Aziz al-Rantisi, and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. I didn’t have anything profound to say, unfortunately. I suspect the most useful answer is that they killed him because they could. When the US-Israel gets a chance to kill, it will. That’s a fairly safe assumption to go on.
For example, on April 16, a 17-year old Palestinian child was shot dead by the Israeli Army in Beitunia, near Ramallah in the West Bank. It was a protest against the wall. Apparently there was rock throwing at the protest, sufficient reason to kill a child.
On April 18, De’yaa Abdul Karim Abu Eid died in a hospital in East Jerusalem. He was 23. He was shot in the chest by an Israeli soldier — you guessed it — protesting the wall in Biddu. He was 400 meters (that’s a quarter of a mile) from the nearest soldier. That means, just for clarification, that it wasn’t crossfire. It was assassination.
The point of pointing out these killings is just to remind readers that probably most of the killing that Israel does in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is just flat out murder of plain civilians, without even a pretense having a mafia-like logic behind it like that against Rantisi.
