Palestinian citizen Selim Raji Hassan Abu Eishah, 57, was killed on Wednesday after being violently assaulted by Israeli occupation forces in the town of al-Ram, north of occupied Jerusalem, in an incident that reflects the growing pattern of field violations against Palestinian civilians across the occupied West Bank.
According to local sources, Israeli soldiers stopped Abu Eishah as he passed through the town and brutally beat him on the head until he lost consciousness. He later died of his injuries. Medical teams from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society received his body at the Qalandiya checkpoint and transferred it to the Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah.
The assault that led to Abu Eishah’s death cannot be viewed as an isolated or spontaneous incident, but rather as part of a systematic policy pursued by the Israeli occupation in its treatment of Palestinian civilians which is characterised by the use of excessive force without justification, including physical assault, field executions, and arbitrary detention.
This act constitutes an extrajudicial killing, explicitly prohibited under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which obliges the occupying power to respect the lives of civilians and protect them from physical harm and degrading treatment. The beating of an unarmed man to death is also a clear violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which guarantees humane treatment for all persons not taking part in hostilities.
The repeated occurrence of such field killings in the West Bank, including Jerusalem and its suburbs, points to a deliberate policy aimed at humiliating and subjugating Palestinians through violence, outside any legal or judicial framework. Beating a person to death is not merely excessive use of force; it is a deliberate punitive act intended to instil fear and terror among the civilian population.
The continued perpetration of these crimes amid international silence amounts to implicit complicity, allowing the perpetrators to escape justice and deepening the suffering of a people who have lived under occupation for decades.
