Brian Avery - Shooting Incident

Shooting Incident

In a February 2005 interview, he said:

e weren't two blocks from our apartment when an Israeli convoy of two vehicles, a tank and an armored personnel carrier, drove up the street from the direction that we were walking from. And so as we heard them coming closer, we stepped off to the side of the road to let them pass by, which was again, you know, a very, very typical situation for us to encounter the soldiers, even during the curfew, and for them just to pass on by ... And so we stood to the side of the road, we put our hands out to show we didn't have any weapons and weren't, you know, threatening them in any way. And I was wearing a fluorescent vest to, you know, try to make ourselves as visible as possible. And once they drove within about 30 meters of where we were standing, they opened fire with their machine guns and continued shooting for a very long time, probably shooting about, you know, 30 rounds of ammunition, which is quite a lot when you see them in action. And I was struck in the face with one of the bullets and, you know, was knocked to the ground immediately.

Avery was hit in the face, his cheek was torn and his eye socket and jaw bones were smashed. The bullet entered at his right tear duct, completely destroying his nasal bone, and exiting his left cheek. His lower left jaw had been sheared in half, and he lost half the teeth on the top left side of his mouth. After three months of hospitalization, Avery found that he would still hear an echo in his skull whenever he spoke. He was left without a sense of smell, or the ability to breathe through his nose. In the first year subsequent to the incident, he endured over six rounds of surgery in which bone was removed from his skull to help reconstruct his face. Because he did not have health insurance, this created an enormous financial burden for his family.

According to the Jerusalem Post (9/20/07; 11/19/08), Brian and his associates were "wearing red reflector vests with the word "doctor" in English and Arabic." The army refused to order a formal investigation of the incident, since that their probe found that no soldiers on patrol in the area that night reported such an incident as it was described by the four witnesses.