Israel will return the remains on Sunday of a Palestinian killed by soldiers over a decade ago, an Israeli human right groups said on Thursday.Here is what happened:
Israeli rights group Center for the Defense of the Individual (HaMoked), said in a statement that the remains of Ahmad Ayid Faqih from the Hebron area town of Dura, will be returned via the Tarqumiya checkpoint west of Hebron on Sunday evening.
The remains matched DNA samples taken from relatives, HaMoked said.
Faqih was killed on Dec. 27, 2002 after he and Muhammad Mustafa Shahin broke into the Israeli settlement of Otniel south of Hebron and opened fire inside a Yeshiva school. The attack killed two Israeli soldiers and two settlers before Faqih and his companion were shot dead in the ensuing firefight.
At the time Faqih was 20 years old.
The Islamic Jihad movement claimed responsibility for the operation, which came at the height of the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising in the 2000s against the decades-long Israeli occupation.
On Friday night, 27 December 2002, over 100 students and faculty members of Yeshivat Otniel were getting ready to have dinner in the dining room of the Yeshiva, while in the adjacent kitchen, four yeshiva students on kitchen duty organized the first course of the Sabbath meals. Two of the four students on kitchen duty were IDF soldiers on leave without pay from the army.Noam Apter saved possibly dozens of lives with his quick thinking - and sure knowledge that his locking the door meant that he would be murdered within seconds.
Meanwhile, two Palestinian militants of the Islamic Jihad, disguised as Israeli soldiers and equipped with battle vests, M-16 rifles and hand grenades, made their way to the settlement through the valley located between Othniel and the town of Dahariya,[2] and managed to infiltrate into the settlement. The militants cut the rickety fence which was erected around the building of the Yeshiva[2] and afterwards, around 19:45 pm, they snuck into the building through the back door of the kitchen. The students on kitchen duty had just finished preparing the main dishes on serving plates and were about to bring them into the dining room when the militants entered the kitchen and opened fire at them. In the last moments of his life, Staff Sergeant Noam Apter, upon immediately realizing what was happening, managed to lock the sliding door separating the kitchen and the dining room, before he was murdered by the militants. In doing so, Noam prevented the militants from entering the dining room and carrying out a far deadlier attack. Nevertheless, after killing the students on kitchen duty, the militants smashed the window of the sliding door and began shooting through it into the dining room, wounding four yeshiva students, one of them critically.[2] The majority of the students in the dining room managed to hide underneath the tables while some of them, whom were carrying weapons with them, returned fire at the militants.
No doubt Faqih will receive a hero's welcome on Sunday, just like last Sunday.
To Israel, a hero is someone who saves lives. To Palestinian Arabs, a hero is someone who murders.
And by the sick calculus of the enlightened Western world, each side's positions are equally valid.