Stephen McCloskey. All rights reserved.
Contagion of conflict
Over the past year, there has been a worrying contagion of the conflict in the West Bank triggered initially by tightened Israeli restrictions on Palestinian access to Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque, one of the holiest sites in the Muslim faith.
At the time, UNESCO censured Israel for ‘aggression and illegal measures restricting freedom of worship’, particularly at Al Aqsa which became a flashpoint for violence. The escalation of violence included ‘lone wolf’ Knife attacks by Palestinians which was regularly met by lethal force on the part of the Israeli military and police. Over the past year, 250 Palestinians have been killed including 50 children with 33 Israelis having lost their lives in attacks in the same period. The human rights group Al Haq has alleged that many of the Palestinian deaths involved the avoidable use of lethal force in cases that amounted to ‘unlawful killings’. These killings are regularly shrouded in controversy as Israeli forces often claim that their victims were armed or engaged in a ‘terrorist attack’ and, later, retract and alter their narrative of events when it is flatly contradicted by eye witness testimony or video evidence.
