HEBRON, Dozens of Palestinian students today suffocated as Israeli soldiers targeted them in Beit Ummar town, north of the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, according a local media activist.
Mohammad Awad said that the heavily-armed soldiers sealed off the main entrance of the southern West Bank town, denying mourners and pallbearers taking part in a funeral procession from passing and triggering confrontations.
The soldiers fired volleys of tear gas canisters towards local female students as the latter were exiting their school, causing dozens to suffocate.
Attacks on education by Israeli military forces and Israeli settlers in the Palestine constitute grave violations of children’s rights to education and development. These attacks are particularly prevalent in the most vulnerable areas of the West Bank – Area C, H2 and Jerusalem.
Israeli severely restricts Palestinians’ freedom of movement within the occupied West Bank through a complex combination of approximately 500 fixed checkpoints, hundreds of flying checkpoints, settler-only roads, over 200 military bases and various other physical obstructions.
Closures besides to other measures, taken under the guise of security, are intended to entrench Israel’s 55-year-old military occupation of the West Bank and its settler colonial project which it enforces with routine and frequently deadly violence against Palestinians.
Source: Palestine News & Info Agency