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A three-year-old Palestinian boy has died in hospital, four days after he was shot in the head by Israeli soldiers while riding in a car with his father in the occupied West Bank. Mohammed al-Tamimi (above) was airlifted to the Sheba hospital near Tel Aviv after the incident on Thursday night and remained in a critical condition until medical officials announced his death on Monday. His father, Haitham al-Tamimi, 40, is still being treated at a Palestinian hospital. His injuries are not believed to be life-threatening. —The Guardian, June 5, 2023 |
After blocking entrances to a village
in the Occupied West Bank,
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) shot
a father and his three year old boy
because they lived there.
Bullets went through the boy’s head;
he was airlifted to a Jewish hospital
near Tel Aviv. They shoot the boy
then act as if they want to save him.
A few days later he’s dead.
His father’s in a Palestinian hospital bed.
What is life to him now?
The story was, the IDF said,
that the bullets were shot by Palestinians.
This is how the narrative always starts.
Then the word “crossfire” is used.
But eyewitnesses said there was no other gunfire.
Then the IDF admits they shot the father and his son
and “regrets harm to noncombatants. Doing everything
in its power to prevent…” The case is closed.
Bonnie Naradzay’s poems have appeared in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), RHINO, Kenyon Review online, Tampa Review, Florida Review online, EPOCH, Dappled Things, The Birmingham Poetry Review, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry Miscellany, and other places. In 2010 she was awarded the New Orleans MFA program’s poetry prize: a month’s stay in the castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter, Mary. For many years, she has led regular poetry sessions at day shelters for the homeless and also at a retirement center, all in Washington, DC.