Soldier critically hurt in Gaza border shooting identified as Barel Shmueli, 21

A Border Police officer shot and critically wounded during a riot on the Gaza Strip border was identified as 21-year-old Barel Hadaria Shmueli from Beer Yaakov in central Israel, police said early Sunday.

Shmueli was shot in the head at point-blank range during major clashes along the Gaza border on Saturday.

The Border Police said in a statement that Shmueli underwent an operation at Soroka hospital in Beersheba and was still in intensive care in a life-threatening condition.

The statement said that Shmueli was a sniper in the elite undercover mista’arvim unit and had taken part in “dozens of operations to foil terror attacks and crime in the southern region.”

In the attack on Shmueli, as seen in video footage widely shared on social media, a man with a pistol ran up to a small hole in the concrete wall along the Gaza border that he was using as a shooting position and fired a number of shots through it, hitting the border guard.

Prior to the shooting, a group of young Palestinian men could be seen running up to and attempting to destroy his gun, hitting it with a pipe, throwing a rock at it and attempting to wrest it away.

“The soldier fought back and prevented the gun in his hands from being taken away,” the Israel Defense Forces said.

Another angle of the incident on the Gaza border shows a Palestinian apparently shooting with a handgun through the hole in the border wall, before the others try to snatch the IDF soldier’s rifle. pic.twitter.com/ko69mHH4QW

— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) August 21, 2021

Later Saturday, the IDF carried out airstrikes on four Hamas weapons storage sites in Gaza in response to the riots and the attack on Shmueli.

At least 41 rioters were injured by Israeli troops during the hostilities, two of them critically, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.

One of the critically hurt Gazans was a 13-year-old boy, Palestinian health officials said.

Defense Minister Benny Gantz told Channel 13 news that Israel “will not accept any harm to our forces. The incidents at the fence are grave and we will respond to them.”

The military said in a statement that soldiers had confronted hundreds of rioters near the border fence in the northern Strip over the course of three hours on Saturday afternoon and evening.

Alongside tear gas, soldiers used standard sniper fire and Ruger bullets, a small-caliber form of live fire that is less lethal than normal rounds under certain circumstances.

Palestinians use slingshots to hurl rocks at Israeli security forces across the Gaza border during a demonstration by the fence with Israel, east of Gaza City on August 21, 2021. (Photo by SAID KHATIB / AFP)

“Israel Defense Force soldiers, who were prepared in advance, used riot dispersal methods, which when necessary included Ruger and sniper fire,” the army said.

Videos that were streamed by Palestinian journalists at the scene throughout the afternoon and early evening showed hundreds of…