The eight-year-old child from Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhood of Beit Hanina who was reported missing on Friday was found dead at the bottom of a cistern on Saturday morning, according to Israeli media reports. “When we arrived at the scene there was a big bustle, dozens of people were walking around the place. Local medical staff performed basic resuscitation on the child. While transferring him to an intensive care unit, we were told that he was extracted from the reservoir without signs of life. We continued the medical care and cleared it while performing CPR operations at the hospital,” Magen David Adom Paramedic Yanai Levy said in a statement. Police forces and thousands of volunteers spent several hours searching for him.
According to Israel Police, Qais abu Ramila was last seen on Friday afternoon and later reported missing by his family. He was last seen entering a car. His parents said they believed he was kidnapped.
“We demand the police check security footage [from the streets],” his family told The Jerusalem Post‘s sister publication Maariv. “If it turns out he was kidnapped by [Jewish West Bank] settlers it would set the entire neighborhood on fire.” The kid’s father was taken to questioning by the police. According to Ynet, this is a routine procedure and the father is not a suspect.
MK Ahmad Tibi took part in the searches and called local residents to “let security services do their job and search for the child everywhere.”
“Things are worrisome,” he told Ynet, “I hope that all doubts will be proven false and that the police and us will find the child in good health.” Police forces in the area confronted dozens of residents who began to throw stones at the security forces, police spokesperson reported. 12 people were reported as lightly injured by Ynet. Police forces prevented the protesters from entering the Jewish parts of the city during Shabbat and arrested three men for disturbing the peace.
In July 2014 a Palestinian teenager named Mohammed Abu Khdeir was kidnapped and his body was discovered in the Jerusalem Forest, burned by his murderers. Yosef Ben-David, 29, and two other Jewish-Israelis who were minors at the time were found guilty of the crime. Ben-David was sentenced to life in prison with an additional 20 years sentence, one of the minors was sentenced to life in prison, and the other minor, who was involved in the murder, was sentenced to 21 years in prison. In Israel, life imprisonment is usually a 20-year period.
The murder of Abu Khdeir is the subject of ‘Our Boys,’ a television miniseries aired on HBO.
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