(MENAFN- Jordan News Agency) The Israeli military and intelligence services Sunday refused to hand over the bodies of two teen-age Palestinians, who were shot and killed by police during confrontations in occupied East Jerusalem.
Witnesses said police officers pumped more than 10 bullets into the body of 19-year-old Fadi Alwan, alleging he was trying to stab a Jewish settler at the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's walled Old City Sunday morning. The shooting came a day after 19-year-old Mohannad Halabi from the town of El Bireh in the occupied West Bank, was fatally shot by Israeli police in the Old City after he stabbed to death two Jewish settlers and wounded two others. The Shabak secret service withheld their bodies, ignoring pleas by their families to hand them over.
Mohammad Mahmoud, a lawyer for the Palestinian human rights group Addameer (Arabic for conscience), which advocates the cause of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, said the Israeli intelligence service had told him the bodies, which were held in a morgue in the Abu Kabir Hospital, will not be handed over "at this stage".
Israeli forces staged a dawn raid into the East Jerusalem Arab village of Issawiyeh and detained Alwan's father and brother.
A local official in the village said a force from the special military units and intelligence service stormed Alwan's family home, assaulting women and firing tear gas and rubber bullets against youth and journalists who converged on the site.
The attacks further heightened tensions in Jerusalem and across the occupied West Bank, which were stoked by weeks of clashes on the Haram al Sharif (Al Aqsa Mosque). Israeli forces continued to impose a tight security cordon around the mosque, indefinitely barring Palestinian worshippers of all ages from entering the compound.
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