August 19, 2023: Aviad Nir, 28, was shot and killed, along with his father, Shay Silas Nigreker, 60, by an unknown perpetrator at a car wash in the West Bank.
The two men were residents of Ashdod, south of Tel Aviv, in the southern part of Israel. They had apparently been visiting a friend in an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank, and were returning back to Ashdod when they stopped at a car wash in the northern West Bank town of Huwara, south of Nablus.
Media sources said that an unknown assailant opened fire, critically injuring the Israeli man and his son. The shooter then fled on foot.
According to Palestinian sources, Israeli officials initially thought that the victims were Palestinian and did not send an ambulance for thirty minutes.
During that time, a Palestinian ambulance with the Red Crescent emergency response service arrived on the scene and tried to treat the two wounded men. After 30 minutes, an Israeli ambulance with the Magen David Adom ambulance service arrived and took over the resuscitation efforts, which were unsuccessful.
According to the Israeli army’s preliminary investigation, the shooter approached the men on foot, and fired from close range with a handgun.
The Israeli occupation army, in its continued search for the perpetrator, closed several military roadblocks in the vicinity of Nablus and the town of Huwara, tightening its inspection procedures, causing severe traffic crises.
The military arrested the owner of the car wash where the attack took place, although there is no indication that he was involved in any way. The army has not identified the perpetrator of Saturday’s shooting, but they locked down all of the nearby villages and towns and have installed additional checkpoints and raided homes and cars in the area.
On Saturday night, following the daytime shooting attack, Israeli colonial settlers rampaged in the town of Huwara, throwing rocks at Palestinian pedestrians and vehicles and setting fires, in a scene that brought back memories of the Israeli settler riots in February, in which hundreds of Palestinian homes and cars were burned by Israeli paramilitary settlers. During the February riots, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stated that he wanted Huwara to be ‘wiped off the map’, saying it was a ‘hotbed for terrorists’.
In the pre-dawn hours on Sunday morning, Israeli forces stationed in Huwara shot and wounded a masked Israeli paramilitary settler who had been throwing objects at vehicles on Route 60 – a road traveled by both Israeli colonial settlers and indigenous Palestinians.
Aviad was from Ashdod (formerly the Palestinian city of Isdud) in what is now Israel. Source: IMEMC