RAMALLAH, Thursday, April 13, 2023 (WAFA) – The Israeli State Prosecutor closed today the probe into the police officers who murdered a Palestinian young man in Jerusalem’s Old City earlier this month, under the pretext there was no enough evidence to convict the police officers involved in the fatal shooting, Israeli media reports said today.
Mohammad Khaled al-Osaibi, 26, from the town of Hura in the Naqab desert, was shot and killed in cold blood by Israeli police around midnight on April 2-3 at the Chain Gate (Bab al-Silsila), one of the gates leading to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City.
Although the Israeli police claimed that the killing of 26-year-old Mohammed al-Osaibi was an incident of a response to a premeditated attack, eyewitnesses have mostly rejected that Israeli narrative of the event, and it was hard to believe the police’s insistence that the shooting wasn’t captured on the many CCTV cameras in the area.
Israeli media reports claimed that the Police Internal Investigations Department closed the probe into the deadly incident “due to the lack of an offense,” which according to the Israeli Public Prosecutor’s statement happened in a place not covered by any CCTV cameras and that the cops didn’t have time to activate their body cameras.
Israeli daily Haaretz quoted an Israeli police official as saying, “It is illogical that there is no documentation of the incident,” and that “it is not true that there are no CCTV cameras at Bab al-Silsilah.” Meanwhile, the former occupation’s Police Chief in Jerusalem, Yair Yitzhaki, stated, “I do not believe that there were no surveillance cameras that documented the incident. I myself installed CCTV cameras in the area during my work period.”
In recent years, the Israeli Public Prosecution closed several probes, including into the case against the settler who stabbed Palestinian young man Ali Harb in the olive grove near the colonial settlement of in Salfit Governorate.
The crime took place in June 2022, when a group of settlers arrived at an olive grove near the village of Iskaka, east of Salfit, to establish a new settlement outpost. As soon as the settlers arrived in the area, confrontations broke out between Palestinian citizens and Israeli settlers, during which one of the settlers stabbed Harb to death.
