2000 Ramallah lynching
The 2000 Ramallah lynching was a violent incident that took place on October 12, 2000 – early in the Al-Aqsa Intifada – at the el-Bireh police station, where a Palestinian crowd of passing funeral marchers broke in and killed and mutilated the bodies of two Israel Defense Forces reservists.
| 2000 Ramallah lynching | |
|---|---|
Aziz Salha, one of the lynchers, waving his blood-stained hands from the police station window. Salha was later arrested by Israel and sentenced to life imprisonment, but was released in 2011 as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange. | |
| Location | Ramallah, West Bank |
| Date | October 12, 2000 |
Attack type | Lynching |
| Deaths | 2 |
| Injured | 13 Palestinian police officers |
| Victims | Vadim Norzhich and Yosef Avrahami |
| Perpetrators | Aziz Salha, Muhammad Howara, Ziad Hamdada, Mohamed Abu Ida, Wisam Radi, Haiman Zabam, Marwan Ibrahim Tawfik Maadi, and Yasser Ibrahim Mohammed Khatab |
Vadim Nurzhitz and Yosef "Yossi" Avrahami had accidentally entered the Palestinian Authority-controlled city of Ramallah in the West Bank and were taken into custody by Palestinian Authority policemen, 13 of whom were injured while trying to stop the lynching. Tensions had been escalating prior to the incident; over 100 Palestinians, nearly two dozen of them minors, had been killed in the preceding two weeks; the escalating violence had been condemned just five days beforehand by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1322.