levy_12-14r.qxp_Special Report 2/3/22 12:36 PM Page 12
Special Report
Israeli Police Ran Over a Palestinian AntiOccupation Protester—Then Fled the Scene
PHOTO BY MAMOUN WAZWAZ/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES
By Gideon Levy and Alex Levac
Some 15,000 Palestinians attended Suleiman Hathaleen’s funeral in his hometown of Umm al‐Khair, two weeks after he was—allegedly deliberately—run over by an Israeli tow truck. Hathaleen was present at this Sept. 29, 2021 protest and every other demonstration in the Hebron governorate. His resistance against occupation forces was always peaceful; he did not use the stick he always carried or stones. IN THE INTENSIVE CARE ward at Al-Mizan Hospital in Hebron, Suleiman Hathaleen lies sedated and intubated, a gash in his head. No one is allowed to enter his room, not even his two wives or his three daughters and seven sons—though one of the latter managed to sneak in for a moment. It’s not clear how old Hathaleen is. His ID card says 65, but he has said for some time that he passed the 70year mark a while ago and that the ID data is wrong. Hathaleen is a shepherd and a well-known occupation resister and activist in his unrecognized village of Umm al-Khair in the South Hebron Hills.* There is barely a demonstration or act of resistance in this beleaguered and remote area that takes place without his participation. “He is the village’s clock,” his son Eid says of him, in his fine Hebrew. Hathaleen has been in a vegetative state since he was hit by a tow truck working in the service of the Israeli police on Jan. 5, on
Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist and author. Alex Levac is a pho‐ tojournalist. *This article was first published in Haaretz, Jan. 14, 2022, right before Suleiman Hathaleen’s death. © Haaretz. Reprinted with permission. 12
the road leading to his village. The truck had come to haul away Palestinian cars without license plates— mashtubas, in the local parlance. A video clip taken by a villager documented the police officer, who accompanied the tow truck in an armored military vehicle, throwing stones earlier at the cars’ windows so he could reach inside and open their doors, like a practiced car thief. Hathaleen wanted to bodily stop the tow truck after it had already loaded three cars, but its driver accelerated, hit him and dragged his body for several meters on the sandy shoulder of the road, until Hathaleen fell from the heavy truck and lay bleeding. The two police vehicles then sped away without summoning assistance for Hathaleen, like the worst hit-and-run offenders, leaving him by the side of the road,
blood oozing from his head. Though it’s not clear whether Hathaleen was hit deliberately, it’s obvious that if the perpetrators were not police officers and if the injured man were a Jew, the offenders would have been brought to trial at least on a charge of leaving the scene of a hitand-run accident. But those involved in this case were a police officer and a soldier in an army jeep, with a civilian driver working for the police in a tow truck, and the person hit was an older Palestinian. Consequently, the law—actually, no law—applies to the driver or his escorts. Umm al-Khair lies below the settlement of Carmel, in the southern West Bank, its tents abutting the settlement’s fence. Electricity is provided to the settlers via a cable that descends to their state-of-the-art chicken coop and crosses what remains of the land belonging to Umm al-Khair after swaths of it were taken over by the settlers. The chickens have electricity, but not the 36 families, some 200 souls, of the hamlet. Suleiman Hathaleen was born on this land, which his father purchased in 1962 from residents of the nearby Palestinian town
WASHINGTON REPORT ON MIDDLE EAST AFFAIRS
MARCH/APRIL 2022
