Teacher films Israeli raid on West Bank primary school

Troops shown entering classrooms where teacher says they searched children for stones they said had been thrown at them.

A school teacher in the occupied West Bank has filmed Israeli soldiers storming classrooms in an elementary school in the city of Hebron.

Abdel Moniem Salaymeh said the troops entered every classroom in al-Hajj Ziad Jaber school in the Wadi al-Nasara neighbourhood and searched the children.

“They were looking for signs of stones they said were thrown at them from the school,” he said.

Salaymeh told Al Jazeera’s Awad Rajoub that the school staff had tried but failed to prevent the soldiers from entering the premises.

The soldiers stormed the administrator’s office and threatened to close the school if the stone throwing continued, the teacher said.

Bassam Tahboub, Hebron’s head of education, said that the incursion was not the first, adding that scores of students were transferred to hospitals on Tuesday after their school was exposed to tear gas.

“What is happening to children [in the area] – including extrajudicial killings, raids, arrests or exposure to fire and tear gas – reflects negatively on the students’ performance at school and on the children generally,” Tahboub told Al Jazeera.

The official spoke of the presence of psychological support teams to help the students and children of Hebron cope with the violence in the city.

Two weeks ago, local media reported that Israeli forces fired tear gas canisters and stun grenades inside a boys’ secondary school in Jenin city in the northern West Bank while students were inside.

On the same day, Israeli soldiers raided the campus of the Palestine Technical University near the city of Tul Karam.

Source: Al Jazeera

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