The Israeli military said that a mix-up led to a soldier’s “unintentional” killing of a Palestinian toddler earlier this month as the trooper believed he was firing at Palestinian gunmen.
Two-year-old Mohammad al-Tamimi was shot in the head while riding in a car with his father near the West Bank city of Ramallah on June 1, and died of his wounds four days later in an Israeli hospital, reports Xinhua news agency.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said the killing was a crime and demanded an international investigation.
In an examination report published by the Israeli military on Wednesday, it said two Palestinian gunmen fired that night at the Israeli settlement of Neve Tzuf and soldiers.
During the search after the gunmen, an officer noticed “a suspicious vehicle and fired several times into the air”, before another soldier who heard the shots opened fire on Tamimi’s family car, the report said.
“The soldier thought they were the terrorists fleeing the scene and that they were firing at him from the vehicle,” it added.
Blaming miscommunication and “inadequacies in the commanders’ control and command over the incident”, the report noted that the officer who shot in the air will be reprimanded for violating orders.
The incident came amid escalating violence between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank, a territory captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.
According to a report by the Israeli rights group Yesh Din, which analysed military data from 2017 to 2021, fewer than 1 per cent of the hundreds of complaints filed against Israeli soldiers on alleged offences against Palestinians resulted in prosecutions.
20230615-114206
