A few hours before the start of Yom Kippur. soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces arrived at Nur a-Shams Village east of Tulkarm, where they shot and killed Iyad Shelbaya, who had been wanted as a senior Hamas member.
According to soldiers, Shelbaya had been running towards them in a suspicious and threatening manner, and they had fired in self-defense - though it later turned out that he was unarmed. Shelbaya's brother said that he had gotten no chance to do any running, because the soldiers broke into the bedroom and shot him in bed.
This will evidently be one more of the cases when the killing of a Palestinian by the army would never be investigated. No one is likely to try to examine seriously what happened or get at the truth. As B'tselem recently disclosed, in the past ten years the army ceased investigating the circumstances of killings committed by its soldiers.
According to Jewish tradition, Yom Kippur is a day of self-searching, when all should give a serious thought to their deeds in the past year...
