Israeli Army Investigates Shooting of a Palestinian Matriarch

A 95-year-old Palestinian woman earned a grim distinction Tuesday, becoming the oldest known person to be killed in the violence that has raged between Israel and the Palestinians for the past 26 months.

The woman, Fatima Hassan, was shot to death by an Israeli soldier outside the West Bank city of Ramallah as she rode in a taxi van that was trying, in a maneuver commonplace in the Palestinian territories, to make its way around an Israeli checkpoint by using a back road.

The army said initially that troops had fired at the taxi’s tires to try to halt its progress along the road, whose use was forbidden to Palestinians.

Late Tuesday, Israel’s Channel Two television station reported that the Israeli soldier who fired a volley of shots at the taxi was running toward it as he did so -- making it very difficult for him to aim with accuracy -- an apparent breach of army regulations.

Army policy permits shooting in self-defense or at a defined target. The Channel Two report said that at least 17 shots were fired at the moving vehicle.

In addition to Hassan, who suffered a fatal wound to the back, two other female passengers in the taxi were hurt, according to Palestinian medical officials.

The army said the incident was being investigated at the highest levels.

The army also said troops in the area had ample reason to be jittery. Only an hour earlier, it said, a Palestinian taxi had deliberately tried to run down troops at a checkpoint near the village of Surda, north of Ramallah.

“It was an attempt to kill the soldiers, just shortly before this happened, and very close to this same spot,” an army spokeswoman said on the condition of anonymity.

She said the Palestinian driver in that incident had been arrested without injury to himself or soldiers.

The circumstances of Hassan’s death are likely to raise sharp new questions about Israeli military procedures and the risks they may pose to Palestinian civilians facing ever-tightening restrictions on their movements between West Bank towns and villages.

Ramallah, where Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s headquarters are located, has been under recurring Israeli military curfews in recent months.

The army says it carefully investigates each instance of Palestinian civilian casualties under questionable circumstances, but Palestinians insist that soldiers routinely violate stated army policy in their dealings with Palestinian civilians.

It was not immediately known why the army considered the taxi to be a threat -- or why its driver failed to stop as ordered.

Palestinians say drivers often don’t understand commands shouted at them in Hebrew by soldiers, or sometimes panic and believe their best chance is to try to quickly escape any potential confrontation.

Even before the outbreak of violence that swept the Palestinian territories beginning in September 2000, Israeli army checkpoints scattered throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip had been a source of tension. The barriers fill Palestinians with frustration and fury.

Palestinians, backed by human rights groups, say Israeli soldiers arbitrarily harass and intimidate ordinary people -- teachers, doctors, students, laborers -- who are trying to move from one part of the West Bank to another, often for urgent matters relating to work and family.

Israel, on the other hand, considers the checkpoints -- and stringent restrictions on the use of back roads that provide circuitous routes around them -- a key safeguard against the movement of Palestinian militants and weaponry, and thus a crucial tool for fighting the plague of suicide attacks in Israeli cities and towns.

Palestinians are well aware of the dangers of traveling proscribed routes but say they have no choice if they want to get to work or school, visit family or keep doctor appointments.

One of the taxi’s wounded passengers, Kifaya Qadadha, described what she called an indiscriminate hail of gunfire aimed at the van.

“There was so much shooting,” she told journalists from her hospital bed in Ramallah. “We were terrified.”

Relatives described Hassan as a family matriarch, a great-grandmother. When her body arrived at Ramallah hospital after the shooting, sobbing family members clustered around and bent over the stretcher, tearing aside the sheet covering the elderly woman to kiss her face.

“She was old, but this was not the way to end her life,” said her 58-year-old daughter, Aisha, weeping.

On both sides, the conflict’s victims have ranged from infants to the aged.

Several Holocaust survivors in their 80s were among those injured and killed in a suicide bombing at a Passover Seder at a hotel in the Israeli seaside town of Netanya in March -- an attack that triggered a wide-ranging Israeli invasion of the West Bank.

Human rights groups said, however, that Hassan was the oldest recorded fatality during more than two years of fighting.