RAMALLAH, On Saturday evening, the 5th of November, the Damar al-Zaben family arrived at its home in al-Mazra’a al-Sharqiya village, east of Ramallah, after a long and hard day picking olives on their land near the town of Sinjil, along road number 60, which divided their land in half.

After getting home, the family discovered that the olive picking machine was not with them, and it seems that it fell on their way back. The youngest son, Nishan, 16, volunteered to go back and look for it. He asks his cousin, Musab, to go with him.

It was nearly seven in the evening when Nishan and Musab went back to the land, and they arrived there at about eight o’clock, but they could not find the machine, and therefore they decided to return to the village since it was getting late.

Less than 20 meters away from road number 60, they encountered Israeli soldiers hiding in the olive fields, only a few meters away from them.

The two boys immediately took to the ground, at which point the soldiers fired a stun grenade at them and then attacked them, firing live bullets at them while they were lying down. Mosab was hit with three bullets in his back that penetrated his heart, and a fourth bullet in the pelvis, while Nishan was hit by a bullet that penetrated his right side near the chest and penetrated his lungs and a major artery, while two other bullets hit his feet.

“We both felt that it was the end for us and that we are going to be killed,” Nishan said, narrating his horrifying story of that night from his hospital bed in Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah where he was brought after the Israeli army released him last night from Ofer prison, where he was held.

“We were alone in the fields and it was dark with heavily armed soldiers around us. There was no way we would get out alive,” he said.

After Nishan and Musab were shot, one of the soldiers examined them. Musab was dead but Nishan was still conscious.

The soldiers dragged Nishan away from Musab and ripped off his clothes before putting him in a military ambulance, which took him to Shaare Zedek Hospital in Jerusalem.

He arrived at the hospital late on Saturday night in serious condition, bleeding profusely. He lost about 20 units of blood and he was suffering from severe internal bleeding, which caused him to lose consciousness for two days.

“When I woke up on Monday evening, I saw that I was handcuffed to a hospital bed. Two soldiers were standing next to my bed. I did not know what had happened to Musab until Tuesday morning when my father, who was able to contact me through the Prisoner Society’s lawyer, told me that Musab was killed,” adds Nishan.

After his arrest, Nishan was interrogated for long hours in his Israeli hospital bed, even though he was in a critical condition that made it difficult for him to talk.

Nishan was taken to Ofer military camp and prison near Ramallah after eight days in the hospital where he was kept until he was released on a bail of $600 late last night and immediately transferred to the hospital in Ramallah to continue his treatment.

Nishan, the youngest son in his family, consisting of five brothers (Saidam, Mohammad, Ahmad, and Ubadah), left school last year and went to work with his father in construction. Musab worked as a mechanic after he finished vocational school.

After the two boys were shot and Musab was killed, the Israeli media claimed that they were shot because they were throwing stones, which Nishan strongly refuted, stressing that if it was true, he would not have been released from prison so soon.

The Zaben cousins are not the first case of soldiers shooting and killing Palestinians not involved in any activity. According to the Prisoner Society, the Israeli occupation’s narration to justify the crime cannot be trusted, especially since it was the only source of information about that incident until Nishan was able to tell his side of the story.

A similar incident occurred early in October when soldiers shot and killed Khaled Anbar al-Dabbas and Salameh Raafat Sharaya, and injured Basil al-Basbous near Jalazon refugee camp, north of Ramallah, after first claiming they attempted to carry out a car-ramming attack and was later decided it was a false alarm after Basbous was released and explained what happened that night for him and his friends.

Source: Palestine News & Info Agency