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If slain Palestinian teen had been a camel, Israelis would be outraged over her death / Gideon Levy
Haaretz 26 Dec — The body of the camel that soldiers killed for a laugh in November was examined by an Israeli veterinarian; no one took witness statements from Samah Abdallah’s family, and no one ordered an autopsy on her body — If Samah Abdallah had only been a camel, you would have heard of her by now. Had she been a camel, the soldiers who killed her would be in custody for the duration of the proceedings. Had she been an animal, and not an 18-year-old Palestinian, her killing would have shocked many Israelis. But Samah was not a camel. She was a cosmetology student from Amuriya, a tiny, remote West Bank village, who dreamed of becoming a teacher and was studying to be a beautician in the meantime. Her father, Abed, also had a dream: for his daughter to return home safely. And so, because of the tension on the roads that day, November 23, he decided to pick her up in his car after class. It is very dangerous there for the Palestinians, too, and among them are worried fathers like Abed Abdallah. I reported on Friday about Samah’s death: A 16-year-old Palestinian who tried to stab Israelis near the Hawara checkpoint brought the soldiers to kill not only him, as usual, but also to fire with no warning as her family car happened to drive by. For no reason, a soldier in a fortified concrete watchtower fired a bullet into Samah’s head as she sat in the backseat, between her brother and her sister. The soldiers initially claimed, preposterously, that the car’s passengers had a knife, but they soon admitted to her horrified father that they had fired “by mistake.” Three weeks later, Samah died in an Israeli hospital . . . The Israel Defense Force’s Spokesman’s Office, which rushed to express shock over the camel’s killing, calling it “a serious incident that is not in keeping with what is expected from IDF soldiers,” took a completely different, and rather contemptible, tack, in its response to Haaretz regarding Samah Abdallah’s death: “During the incident in which a terrorist brandishing a knife ran, an IDF force opened fire … As a result of the shooting, it seems that the passengers of a vehicle that drove behind the terrorist were injured. … The incident was investigated and the findings are being examined by the military prosecution.” . . . .
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.693969