The father of a 13-year-old Palestinian girl shot dead by an Israeli security guard after trying to stab him accused the man yesterday of acting with disproportionate force.
Ruqayya Abu Eid left her West Bank village of Anata northeast of Jerusalem on Saturday and went to the gate of the nearby Jewish settlement of Anatot.  
Video footage published by Israeli media shows her clutching a knife and running at the private security guard who then shot her dead.
Police claimed she had been feeling suicidal after a fight with her family, and her father, who had been searching for her, arrived too late at the scene of the attack.
He was released after questioning and was among the hundreds who attended her funeral yesterday in Yatta, the southern Hebron hills village from where the family originated.   
“She was a little girl. There’s no reason in the world for her to be shot and killed,” her father Eid Abu Eid told AFP after the funeral.
“The person who shot her could have apprehended her or shot her in the leg - he didn’t have to kill her,” he said by telephone.
“It was as though he issued her a death sentence.”
Rights groups have called on Israel to stop using “lethal force” against attackers, and Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom has accused the Jewish state of carrying out “extrajudicial executions” in confrontations with Palestinians.
Asked if he would seek legal redress, Abu Eid said he had “turned to God” instead, since he trusted no court, Israeli or any other.
His daughter’s death brought the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the wave of violence since October 1 to 156, according to an AFP count. Twenty-four Israelis have also been killed. Ruqayya Abu Eid was the youngest killed in the nearly four months of violence, according to  Israel’s Shin Bet internal agency.