On His Way Home After Prayer, a Man Is Killed by a Bullet to the Head
Salah Sawafta, 58, left the mosque and was walking home when a bullet to the head killed him. The shot was most likely fired by one of the IDF snipers on the fourth floor of an office building, who were spraying the street below with live ammunition. Now the army is trying to shirk responsibility
Bullet casings found in one of the two offices from which shots were fired at the street.Credit: Alex Levac
The wedding of his daughter Dunya, 22, was set for today, Friday. Invitations had gone out to about 1,000 guests for the celebration at the Al-Kalah wedding hall in Nablus. His new suit was also ready. Last Friday, at the conclusion of morning prayers in the mosque in Tubas, he told his friends that he was hurrying home because he had to go to Nablus: There were still arrangements to make for the wedding.
A few minutes after he left the mosque and began walking home, he was shot in the head as he tried to find cover in the street. The bullet slammed into his brain and exploded; he died shortly afterward. His daughter’s wedding was canceled, of course, and instead the family was thrust into deep mourning.
Salah Sawafta was dead.
He was 58, a farmer who sold animal feed, the father of four daughters and a son, the grandfather of two infants. Every day at dawn he walked from his home in the center of the northern West Bank town, to the old mosque of Tubas – built in 1818 – where he recited the morning prayers together with the other regular worshippers, most of them about his age, before returning home to begin his day’s work.
Last Friday was no different. The evening before, he had met with his son, Mohammed, 26, married and the father of a baby boy. Mohammed worked with his father. They talked, naturally, about the rapidly approaching wedding, and parted at 10 o’clock. The following morning, Salah woke up after 4. At 5:25 he lay on the sidewalk on the main street with a hole in his head.
In the building across the way, Israel Defense Forces snipers had taken over two offices on the fourth floor, one belonging to an engineering firm, the other to a lawyer, and from their windows had fired at the street below. It’s one of these soldiers who apparently killed Sawafta.
Clashes had broken out in the street between the soldiers – who had arrived the night before to arrest a wanted person allegedly affiliated with Islamic Jihad – and local residents who were seething following the violent invasion of their relatively calm town. The snipers fired about 30 rounds into the street from their high perch. One of the bullets was apparently aimed at and struck the innocent worshipper, who was on his way home.
It’s quite pleasant in the northern West Bank these days: verdant farmland being tilled and no settlers – a rare and most gladdening vision. Tubas lies between Nablus and Jenin. This week, together with the director of the mobile clinic of the NGO Physicians for Human Rights, Salah Haj Yahya, we reconstructed the events that took place there at dawn last Friday. Here’s where Sawafta emerged from the mosque, descended the stairs, turned left, walked down the alley that leads to the main street, and then turned right to head home. He was alone, having left his friends behind, because he was in a hurry to finish his work and go to Nablus.
Four or five military vehicles were parked in front of the office building at the time, with a group of soldiers milling around next to them. Sawafta walked by them quietly; they paid him no heed. He had no idea that snipers were lurking high above him, inside the building. He continued along the main street until he suddenly heard gunshots. He hurried to a store, Siraj’s Bakery, which is open 24/7, and sells rolls to workers who are headed for jobs in Israel or are returning from them. But he was one step too late.
The proprietor, Abdel Majid al-Masri, recounts in fluent Hebrew what happened. He heard shots and rushed outside to see what was happening. He saw Sawafta trying to enter the bakery, but right on the threshold the bullet struck him in the head and he collapsed, bleeding, on the step there, not before being injured again when he fell on one of the iron legs of the stand at the entrance to the bakery.
Masri himself survived by a miracle. “It came from God. God gave me another chance to live,” he tells us. “If I had taken one more step forward, I would have gone down, too. Fortunately, I took a step back.” He was slightly wounded in the neck by shrapnel and went into shock for a time. “They shot to kill him,” he continues. “To kill a man like that, 58 years old, who had just come from prayers? Here’s where the problem is: They come to kill.”
Masri relates that Sawafta wore flip-flops and a galabia to the mosque, and that he suffered from knee pain – all of which help explain why he was unable to flee faster from the shooting. Masri saw him pull up the edge of his robe so he would be able to move faster. It didn’t help him.
The bakery owner tried to summon a Red Crescent ambulance, but in the meantime a private ambulance arrived – belonging to a neighbor from down the street – and rushed Sawafta to the Turkish Hospital in Tubas. In critical condition, he was quickly transferred to Rafidia Hospital in Nablus, where he underwent surgery – but in vain. A few minutes after the two-hour operation, the physicians pronounced him dead.
Two bullet holes are visible on the traffic sign next to the bakery. In the nearby supermarket, Super Fiaz, we’re shown security camera footage from that fatal morning. It’s 5:24 A.M., and Sawafta, in his beige galabia, passes alone in front of the store. This part of the street looks quiet and deserted. Seconds later Sawafta is seen being shot.
On the fourth floor of the office building, engineer Rova Daragma, who owns the firm Royal Design, shows us a plastic bag in which she collected 11 bullet casings that were scattered on the office floor. On Friday morning, after the army had left, she received a phone call saying that soldiers had broken into her office and had taken over the premises during the night. She rushed there and found the door frame broken, the window overlooking the street open and the casings on the floor. She found around 20 more casings on the floor of the lawyer’s office next door.
It was from here that the street came under fire. The window in Daragma’s office looks out onto the entrance to the bakery where Sawafta was slain. There’s a good view from here; it would be very easy to take aim and shoot from this window.
The troops had arrived that night to arrest Karam al-Haraz, an 18-year-old whom the Shin Bet security service claims is active in Islamic Jihad. People in Tubas were wondering about that this week. His father runs the Radio Palestine office in Tubas on behalf of the Palestinian Authority; he’s a journalist and is affiliated with Fatah. Maybe he didn’t know about his son’s activities. They live not far from the office building, further up the main street.
No one denies that confrontations were taking place in town at the time, but things were relatively quiet around where Sawafta was killed. The young people who threw stones, fired firecrackers and apparently also used live fire, were concentrated down the street, to the left of the bakery as you’re facing it. Sawafta was shot on the right side of his head; the right side of the street was where the snipers were positioned.
Following the incident, the IDF did not try to claim that Sawafta had taken part in the clashes. But the army stated at the time that according to a preliminary investigation, the force apparently had not been shooting at the place where Sawafta was killed. Of course, the army also didn’t fire shots at the place where Al Jazeera journalist Shereen Abu Akleh was killed in May, nor did it fire at the five children who were killed in Jabalya, in the Gaza Strip, on the last day of Operation Breaking Dawn this month. This is the new strategy of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit: First you issue a denial, and afterward, well, God is great.
This week the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit told Haaretz: “IDF soldiers operated last weekend to arrest a terrorist squad that intended to perpetrate an attack, in the village of Tubas, which is in the territory of the Jordan and Valleys Brigade. Following operational activity in the village, there was massive, indiscriminate shooting on the part of armed Palestinians, and in response an IDF unit returned precise fire at said armed individuals. The circumstances of Sawafta’s death are being clarified.”
In the handsome, spacious stone home of the deceased’s elder brother, attorney Jihad Sawafta, 62, friends and family sat in mourning this week. During our visit, on Monday, Mohammed, the deceased’s son, was there, along with some of the other regulars who pray each morning at the old mosque.
A little after 5:30 A.M. Friday, Mohammed got a call, he says, but his cellphone was on mute and it took a few more minutes until someone got through to him. He hurried to the hospital, where he saw his father slip away, exactly a week before his daughter’s wedding, to which he was so looking forward.