Four shot at al-Mughayyir, then forces seal the village entrance

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said its crews treated four Palestinians hit by live ammunition at al-Mughayyir, a village northeast of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, on Sunday evening, and moved all four to hospital.

And local sources said the shooting happened while groups of settlers were attacking the village and its residents' vehicles, with Israeli soldiers alongside them firing live rounds and tear gas at the people who came out. Two of the wounded men were struck in the thigh, one in the chest and one in the abdomen. Dozens of others were hurt by rubber-coated metal bullets or treated for the effects of gas.

The settlers tried to reach a number of houses, among them the home of Sha'ban Abu Aliya, while others moved on dwellings along the western edge of the village, the same sources said. Amin Abu Aliya, who heads the village council, said Israeli forces had closed the village and the land around it to everyone but Israeli settlers for the duration.

The count rose later in the night. Local accounts put the wounded at seven, most of them hit by live fire, and said it was not established whether soldiers or settlers had fired the rounds; some reports attributed the shooting to the settlers. Troops who had gone into the village after the attack pulled back as far as its entrance, which residents said was then shut, with nobody permitted in or out.

Earlier the same day, settlers were reported to have bulldozed large stretches of land at Nahalin, west of Bethlehem, in work said to be for the expansion of the Beitar Illit settlement.

That unresolved question — who fired — is worth holding onto rather than filing as a gap in the reporting. Four men reached hospital with entry wounds in the thigh, the chest and the abdomen, and the neighbours who carried them cannot say whether the rifles belonged to the army or to the civilians the army had turned out to cover. When both are inside one cordon, and the ground within it is open to one of the two groups and closed to everybody else, the wounded lose the ability to name who shot them. A complaint with no addressee is not much of a complaint, and that is a consequence of the arrangement rather than an accident of a confused night.