A sword has hung over the heads of Umm al-Hiran's 1,000 inhabitants for many months, as the Israeli government has advanced plans to raze the Palestinian Bedouin village of 150 homes and replace it with a town for Israeli Jews.
Israeli police claim that they shot dead Abu al-Qiyan after he committed a "car-ramming attack" – driving into a group of Border Police, killing one of them.
…..An aerial video taken by police appears to confirm the witnesses' accounts, showing Abu al-Qiyan driving slowly and cautiously until there were bursts of gunfire from the police. The car can then be seen accelerating and veering wildly down the steep slope.
According to Cook, Israeli Ministers "have echoed seemingly unsubstantiated police claims that Abu al-Qiyan was an ISIL supporter," but "Yacoub Abu al-Qiyan's 24-year-old son, Hussam, who recently returned from his last year of medical studies in Ukraine, said that description of his father bore "no relationship to reality".
But a report on Friday night on Israel's Channel 10 TV challenged that version. Abu al-Qiyan's autopsy, it said, showed he was hit in the torso and knee in the first rounds of shooting. He then bled to death over half an hour while police refused to let an ambulance attend to him.
……A maths teacher, Abu al-Qiyan reportedly had his computer, clothes and his pupils' books in the back of the car when he died.
Cook reports, "In the wake of the leaked autopsy report, liberal Jewish legislators have started to raise questions too about the police conduct.
Ksenia Svetlova, of Zionist Union, said that, if it was shown that Abu al-Qiyan was denied life-saving treatment, "then it's Azaria case number two" – a reference to an army medic, Elor Azaria, who was filmed last year executing a wounded Palestinian in the West Bank city of Hebron.