A Palestinian teenager has been shot dead by Israeli forces during a raid in the northwestern flank of the West Bank, only a few days after the top United Nations human rights official warned of the worsening situation for Palestinians in the occupied territory.
The official Palestinian news agency WAFA, citing local sources, reported that Israeli forces stormed the city of Qalqilya on Thursday, and fired shots at 15-year-old Naeem Abdullah Samha in the eastern Sofin neighborhood of the city.
The sources added that Samha was shot in the chest. He was rushed to hospital but was pronounced dead of his wounds shortly afterwards.
The situation in the West Bank, including East al-Quds, is “dramatically deteriorating,” Volker Turk told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday.
He said 528 Palestinians, 133 of them children, were killed by Israeli military forces or settlers from the start of the current war in Gaza in October to June 15, “in many cases raising serious concerns of unlawful killings.”
Since Israel unleashed a war on the besieged Gaza Strip in early October 2023, casualties have been rising in the West Bank as a result of intensified near-daily Israeli raids into villages and cities in the occupied territories.
At least 547 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces or extremist Jewish settlers since the war began. Over 8,000 Palestinians have been detained as well.
At least 37,431 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have also been killed in Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip over the past eight months during the regime's genocidal war.