Brother of jailed Jenin journalist and Drop Site contributor killed in Israeli raid on his home
Brother of jailed Jenin journalist and Drop Site contributor killed in Israeli raid on his home
Abdullah al-Saadi, the brother of jailed journalist and Drop Site News contributor, Mujahed al-Saadi, was shot and killed by the Israeli military in a raid on his home in Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday night.
Israeli forces stormed Jenin and the Jenin refugee camp with armored vehicles and military bulldozers on Tuesday, tearing up roads, destroying homes and clashing with resistance fighters in the city. At approximately 10:20pm, Israeli soldiers raided al-Saadi’s home in the Horsh al-Saadeh area in western Jenin, some distance away from the main Israeli military operations in the city. Troops shot al-Saadi three times as he was standing in his front yard, according to a Jenin-based journalist who spoke to Drop Site on condition of anonymity out of fear for their safety. He was taken to a hospital but died of his injuries upon arrival.
Al-Saadi, 53, was a colonel in the Palestinian Authority intelligence services and the father of two. In a heart-wrenching video from the hospital, his daughter can be seen weeping over his body, saying, “Get up, get up for my sake.”
Al-Saadi’s death brings the number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in Jenin over the past 48 hours to seven, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa.
The killing of al-Saadi in his home comes seven weeks after his younger brother, Mujahed, was violently arrested by an Israeli special forces unit in a raid on his own home nearby in the same neighborhood. Mujahed al-Saadi, a well-known journalist in the West Bank and a contributor to Drop Site, was beaten in front of his wife and children and dragged away. He was eventually sentenced to six months in administrative detention, a legal mechanism that allows Israeli authorities to detain people without charge or trial, with detention orders often being arbitrarily renewed. Mujahed al-Saadi is being held in Megiddo, a prison notorious for abuse and mistreatment of detainees. It is unclear when or how Mujahed will receive news of his brother’s death since Palestinian prisoners in administrative detention are often deprived of visitation by family or lawyers.