(15 May 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Jerusalem – 15 May 2025
1. Mourners carrying body
2. Relatives crying
3. Various of mourners
4. Wide of funeral ceremony
5. SOUNDBITE (Hebrew) Hananel Gez, Tzeela Gez’s husband:
“You were the light of my life, the most precious gift that I got. Words will never be enough to describe what you were for me, for our cute children, and for so many people whose life changed thanks to your pure soul. You were a woman of infinite mercy, a true hero.”
6. Relatives crying
7. SOUNDBITE (Hebrew) Orit Strook, minister for settlement and national missions:
“Our long hand must be much more determined, and much more lethal against whoever dares to shoot a woman who is on her way to give birth and against anyone who pays those who shoot a woman like that.”
8. Various of relatives crying during funeral ceremony
9. Wide of mourners
10. Mourners carrying body for burial
STORYLINE:
Hundreds of mourners attended the funeral of Tzeela Gez, an Israeli woman killed whilst being driven to hospital to give birth in an attack in the West Bank.
As her husband drove their car through the winding roads of the occupied West Bank late Wednesday, a Palestinian attacker shot at them.
Within hours, Gez, nine months pregnant, was dead.
Doctors barely saved the life of the baby, who is in serious but stable condition.
“You were the light of my life, the most precious gift that I got. Words will never be enough to describe what you were for me, for our cute children, and for so many people whose life changed thanks to your pure soul," Hananel Gez, Tzeela’s husband, said during her funeral on Thursday.
Israel says it is trying to prevent such attacks by waging a monthslong crackdown on West Bank militants that intensified earlier this year.
But the escalating offensive, which has killed hundreds of Palestinians over 19 months, displaced tens of thousands and caused widespread destruction, has ultimately not prevented attacks.
And the latest bloodshed is only likely to fuel a cycle of violence that has persisted for decades between Israelis and Palestinians.
The shooting, especially because the victim was a pregnant mother with three other children, has the potential to ignite vigilante violence against Palestinians by radical Jewish settlers.
They regularly storm Palestinian towns and villages, burning and damaging property, in response to such attacks.
Marauding settlers are rarely held to account for their actions and Palestinians are left to pick up the pieces of the destruction with little recourse to compensation or assistance from Israeli authorities.
The violence in the West Bank escalated when the war in Gaza erupted with Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel.
Israel has staged frequent raids in the territory, especially but not limited to its north, using ground and air power in violence that has killed many militants but also other Palestinians, some of them throwing rocks to protest the incursions as well as others not involved in confrontations.
Israel occupied the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, along with Gaza and east Jerusalem, all territories the Palestinians seek for a future independent state. Around 500,000 Jewish settlers now live in about 130 settlements scattered across the West Bank.
Much of the international community views settlements as illegal and an obstacle to Palestinian statehood. Israel views the West Bank as its biblical heartland and believes the fate of the settlements should be determined in peace negotiations, which have been moribund for some 15 years.
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