A relative of Saad Dawabsheh mourning during his funeral in Duma village near the West Bank city of Nablus yesterday. Dawabsheh died from a wound he sustained after suspected Jewish attackers torched his family home in the occupied West Bank last week. Dawabsheh’s 18-month-old baby Ali was killed in the same attack.
AFP
Duma
The father of a Palestinian toddler killed in a firebomb attack by Jewish extremists last week died from his burns yesterday, and relatives at his funeral denounced Israel for complicity in settler violence.
Thousands of mourners, many waving Palestinian flags, turned out to lay Saad Dawabsheh to rest as his flag-draped body was carried by an honour guard of Palestinian security forces.
“It’s a crime committed by the settlers but with the agreement of the (Israeli) occupation,” relative Anwar Dawabsheh told AFP.
“It isn’t possible that Israel with all its army and its intelligence services still has no information on this attack,” he said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated yesterday evening a pledge to hunt down the killers.
Netanyahu had condemned the attack as “terrorism in every respect” and ordered a crackdown on Jewish extremism that has seen three people arrested, but no one has so far been accused of carrying out the firebombing.
But Arab MP Zouheir Bahloul was unimpressed by the pace of the investigation.
“A week has passed and, apart from a few showcase arrests, the security forces have no clue or idea who set this terrible fire,” Bahloul, of the main opposition Zionist Union party in Israel, said in a statement.
The July 31 attack in the village of Duma that killed 18-month-old Ali Saad Dawabsheh, and also wounded his mother and brother, led to angry Palestinian protests and an international outcry over Israel’s failure to curb violence by hardline settlers.
Saad Dawabsheh died early yesterday in hospital in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba where he was being treated for third-degree burns for the past eight days.
Dawabsheh’s wife, Riham, and four-year-old son Ahmed are still fighting for their lives in another Israeli hospital, near Tel Aviv.
However, a doctor said Ahmed was showing some encouraging signs.
The Dawabsheh family’s small brick and cement home was gutted by the fire, and a Jewish Star of David was spray-painted on a wall along with the word “revenge”.
“Nothing will stop these murderous settler attacks and... we cannot wait until they come into our villages and our homes,” Hossam Badran, spokesman of the Hamas movement, wrote on Facebook yesterday.
“Our people in the West Bank have only one choice: that of open and comprehensive confrontation against the occupation.”
Israeli media reported that the army was on alert for possible unrest in the occupied territory and for “revenge attacks”.
Some of those at the funeral hurled rocks at Israeli border police nearby, who responded with tear gas, but there were no reports of injuries or arrests.
