On Wednesday September 30th, a Palestinian teenager was killed in Ya’bad, a small town in the north of the occupied West Bank.  Fuad Mahmoud Nayif Turkman, aged 17, was standing outside his school at 11am when he was run over by an Israeli military jeep.
 
According to several eye-witnesses, including three students and a teacher at the school, the jeep targeted Fuad directly.  The first impact threw the youth into the air, and when he fell to the ground in front of the vehicle, the driver drove his two front wheels over Fuad’s chest and torso.
 
When teachers and students tried to come to Fuad’s rescue, saying they would call an ambulance for him, the Israeli occupation forces blocked anyone from approaching.  According to one student, the soldiers simply asked: “What is the problem?”
 
After thirty minutes, the soldiers finally let a relative drive Fuad to hospital in the nearby city of Jenin.  He died from his injuries an hour later.
 
When I heard the news that afternoon, I was shocked, and immensely saddened.  An innocent teenager murdered in cold blood, for no other reason than he is a Palestinian.  Yet another casualty of the Israeli occupation.
                         
You would expect such a story to be all over the news, but alas, Palestinian lives are not deemed important enough to report.  Most mainstream media provided no coverage, so no-one will know Fuad’s name.  I managed to find one report on BBC News, hidden within the Middle East section.
 
“Reports say that Israeli military personnel were confronting Palestinian teenagers,” stated the BBC, “who were throwing stones at the time of the incident.”
 
These so-called “reports” contradict the testimonies of all the eye-witnesses at the scene, so why does the BBC use this statement to open the article.
 
Of course, a BBC report can never tell the story of an Israeli atrocity without immediately attempting to justify it with a Palestinian crime.  The final line of the BBC report could not have looked more out of place:
 
“On Tuesday, a Palestinian gunman shot and wounded an Israeli motorist in the West Bank.”
 
It fails to mention that the “Israeli motorist” happens to be a settler, living in an illegal settlement, built on a Palestinian’s family land. Of course this shooting cannot be condoned as an isolated incident, but there is a big difference between an ordinary man fighting against the colonialisation of his country, and an armed soldier murdering an innocent teenage boy.
 
In trademark fashion, the Israeli military attempted to justify their actions.  Why did they run over a Palestinian boy standing outside his school?  “Hundreds” of stone-throwing Palestinians were “rioting” in the area, and the jeep was experiencing “mechanical difficulties”.
 
No comment.
 
Fuad Turkman’s story will never reach our front pages, or our television screens.  I was trying to imagine the media outcry if a similar thing happened the other way round – an innocent Israeli teenager murdered in cold blood.
 
But Fuad… he’s just another Palestinian.

 
Photo: AFP, Fuad Turkman’s funeral in his home town of Ya’bad

Photo: http://www.ianandwendy.com/