used to be hijabae

While two of my brothers were crossing the DCO checkpoint in Ramallah to get home, IOF forces opened fire with rubber bullets & teargas unprovoked.

He has a 20 minute video of the event that he's trying to send me [terrible internet connection], in which a baby suffocated by the gas is rushed into an ambulance. Another part of the video has someone shouting that someone had "been hit directly".

Israeli forces regularly target Palestinians directly with teargas canisters, which have killed & maimed many Palestinians.

To get home, my brothers had to take a different set of roads, turning their already contorted & checkpoint riddled trip home longer by an hour, as the IOF had closed the DCO checkpoint entirely.

The route home had a spontaneous checkpoint, marked only by parked IOF jeeps & forces parked in the road. Given how dark it was & the fact that the checkpoint wasn't even supposed to be there, they came dangerously close before realizing & slamming the brakes, looking up to see IOF guns pointed at them.

Over the phone, my brother remarked to me in a horrified & adrenaline riddled voice how close he felt he came to being shot & how easily they would've accused him of trying to ram into them. Stories of Palestinians slain at checkpoints are numerous, with many families stating that the person killed would never carry out such an attack. Many killed were on their way to events, or getting married soon, etc.

Had my brother glanced at his phone, been a little tired, looked away for a second, he & my brother driving with him would've been another statistic, with it likely described as an "attempted attack".