May 3, 2024
NABLUS, West Bank (AP) — There was no mourning tent for 23-year-old Palestinian Zuhair al-Ghaleeth. There were no banners with his portrait, no chants celebrating his martyrdom.
Instead, a bulldozer dropped his bullet-riddled body into an unmarked grave, witnesses said.
The day after six masked Palestinian gunmen shot and killed al-Ghaleeth over his suspected collaboration with Israel, his family and friends refused to pick up his body at the morgue, the public prosecution said. He was buried in a field cluttered with discarded animal bones and soda cans outside the northern West Bank city of Nablus.
It was a grim end to a short life. The April 8 killing in the Old City of Nablus — the first slaying of a suspected Israeli intelligence collaborator in the West Bank in nearly two decades — riveted the Palestinian public and cast a spotlight on the plight of collaborators. The case has laid bare the weakness of the Palestinian Authority and the strains that a recent surge in violence with Israel is beginning to exert within Palestinian communities.
“It feels like we’re in war times,” said 56-year-old Mohammed, who heard shouting that night, followed by gunshots. He ventured out of the Ottoman-era bathhouse where he works to find his neighbor, al-Ghaleeth, motionless on the ground, his eyes rolled up and mouth agape. A crowd of Palestinians swelled around his bloodied body. “Collaborator!” they yelled. “Spy!”
The angry gathering around al-Ghaleeth's body quickly turned into a protest of the Palestinian Authority, which administers most Palestinian cities and towns in the West Bank. The cries against al-Ghaleeth's perceived betrayal took on new meaning as the crowds directed their anger toward the deeply unpopular self-rule government, which ordinary Palestinians accuse of collaboration with Israel for coordinating with Israeli security forces.
“It was chaos,” acknowledged Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian Authority official. Palestinian security forces fired tear gas. Medics rushed al-Ghaleeth to a Nablus hospital, where they tried to resuscitate him but could not get a pulse. A medical report seen by The Associated Press said al-Ghaleeth died of gunshot wounds in his lower extremities at 10:15 p.m.
The next morning, as word spread that al-Ghaleeth had been building a house in the nearby village of Rujeib, Palestinians swarmed the construction site, poured gasoline over the unfinished walls and set them on fire.
An independent armed group known as the Lion’s Den, which has risen to prominence in the past year, seemed to take responsibility.
After news of al-Ghaleeth’s death broke, the Lion’s Den declared that “the traitor was liquidated."
Lion’s Den member Tyseer Alfee said the killing was a warning. "We want all to see the fate of those who collaborate with the Israeli occupation,” he wrote in a text message when asked why al-Ghaleeth was shot publicly in the bustling marketplace, his body left for residents to find.
In recent months, the Israeli army has killed most key commanders and founders of the Lion's Den, it says. In an apparently rare targeted killing last fall, a bomb on a motorbike exploded as militant Tamer al-Kilani walked past. Purported security video provided by the Lion's Den shows an unidentified man parking the motorbike and exiting the frame before the blast killed al-Kilani.
In a pasture outside Nablus — between a horse farm and an Israeli military checkpoint — teenagers working the field steer clear of a certain patch of rocks.
“If the spy was guilty, he deserves what happened,” said 16-year-old Laith, looking toward the unmarked grave. “Only God knows the truth."
