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Conflicting Reports Surround Death of PA Minister at Demonstration

by TheTower.org Staff |

Ziad Abu Ein, a minister without portfolio in the Palestinian Authority (P.A.), died today after confronting soldiers at a demonstration. Circumstances surrounding the incident remain murky.

A video that appeared on social media shows a border policeman shoving Abu Ein when he approached him aggressively, but does not corroborate other witness accounts.

The New York Times reports:

Abla Kook, 49, a member of the Turmus Aya village council who attended the demonstration, said about 150 people were attempting to march to the land near the outpost but that soldiers prevented them from getting close and began to fire tear gas.

Ms. Kook said that Mr. Abu Ein, at the vanguard of the protest, argued with the Israeli troops who would not let him pass. One of the Israeli soldiers, wearing a helmet, head-butted Mr. Abu Ein in the chest, Ms. Kook said.

Other witnesses said Mr. Abu Ein had been shoved and struck with a rifle butt.

The Palestinian television service Palmedia News showed video of demonstrators holding flags and olive branches as they marched through clouds of tear gas. Mr. Abu Ein was interviewed by the television service, part of the official Palestine Public Broadcasting Corporation, shortly before he collapsed. “This is a criminal army,” he said. “It practices crimes against our land. We did not throw a single stone at them and they attacked us.”

The Times and other media outlets report that an IDF paramedic attempted to treat Abu Ein, but that the stricken official was carried away. In the tweet below a medic can be seen treating Abu Ein.

The Algemeiner quotes Sky News correspondent Tom Rayner:

“When he’s on the floor, an Israeli medic does come up to him, she tries to clear an area around him, but Palestinians pick him up and take him straight to a vehicle,” Rayner said, in footage viewed by The Algemeiner. The medic was “not able to deliver any first aid,” Rayner continued, and Abu Ein was “declared dead when he got to a hospital in Ramallah.”

Abu Ein, formerly the P.A.’s deputy minister for prisoner affairs, was previously a security prisoner in Israel. The BBC reports:

Mr Abu Ein once received the death sentence, commuted to life imprisonment, from a court in Israel for a 1979 bombing that killed two Israeli teenagers.

He was released in 1985 as part of a prisoner exchange that saw the release of three Israeli soldiers captured in Lebanon.

In 2006, Abu Ein boasted that “without Oslo, and being armed through Oslo, and without the Palestinian Authority’s “A” areas, without the training, the camps, the protection afforded by Oslo, and without the freeing of thousands of Palestinian prisoners through Oslo – this Palestinian resistance and we would not have been able to create this great Palestinian Intifada.”

[Photo: PALMEDIA / YouTube ]

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