Palestinians mourn Jerusalemite killed by Israel forces

The funeral of 42-year-old Jerusalemite Osama Siddiq Mansour was held in the occupied village of Biddu village on Tuesday.

Mansour was killed after Israeli occupation forces opened fire at his car in the early hours of Tuesday morning, his wife was injured in the incident. The couple were on their way home.

Osama Mansour, 42, and his wife Sumayya, 35, were on their way home around 2:30am when they were stopped at a flying checkpoint.

In an interview with news channel Palestine TV, Sumayya said that occupation soldiers stopped her and her husband’s car at the checkpoint and told them to turn off the vehicle, which she says they did.

“Then they told us to turn the car back on and leave, and so we drove off – and then they all started firing bullets at us,” she said from her hospital bed in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) condemned the “atrocious crime”, calling it  “just one in a long and ongoing series of extrajudicial executions” committed by Israeli forces.

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While Hamas called for escalating all forms of resistance in the West Bank to punish the Israeli occupation for its crimes against the Palestinians.

“A new crime, committed by the occupation against a Palestinian family, led to the martyrdom of Osama Mansour and seriously injured his wife in the west of Occupied Jerusalem,” the movement’s spokesman Hazem Qasem said.

“Such ongoing crimes entail escalating all forms of resistance to punish the occupation, make it pay dearly for its crimes, and curb the aggressive behaviour of its army and settlers,” he added.

The Israeli military said in a statement that the Mansours’ vehicle accelerated towards a group of soldiers “in a way that endangered their lives”, and that the soldiers responded with gunfire “to thwart the threat”.

A claim denied by the family.