A young Palestinian hangs out at a café. Moments later he is shot dead by Israeli troops

Raad Matar sitting next to a portrait of his son Yasser who was killed by IDF forces in September 2024

Gideon Levy reports in Haaretz on 9 November 2024:

A café, in the early hours of a Thursday morning in September. A few young men are sprawled on striped crimson sofas, chairs are scattered about. A few young men are chatting; another is lying on a sofa in his socks, fast asleep. The noise around him doesn’t faze him. He’s exhausted after working all day in Israel.

One guy in shorts gets up slowly and makes his way to the door, followed by two of his friends. It’s about 3 A.M., and they’ve been here since early evening. It’s Thursday, a night to hang out since there’s no work on Friday. And this coffee shop is virtually the only place in the Qalandiyah refugee camp in the West Bank where young men can meet up outside their homes.

Suddenly the men who left come running back inside: Soldiers are in the camp. Everyone – there are around 10 young men – jumps up. One of them touches his sleeping friend, Yasser Matar, lightly on the leg, calls his name and utters a warning: “jaysh” – army. Yasser hurriedly gets up in order to put on his shoes, don his cap and go out into the street. Many times during the army’s recent, frequent nighttime incursions in Qalandiyah, soldiers have entered the café and beat up people there, for no apparent reason. So tonight’s group was in a rush to leave. A few of them were also worried about their cars, parked out on the street. The army has been known to damage cars during their raids.

Qalandiyah lies between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Even though all the dwellings in the camp are across the separation barrier in the West Bank, some of the inhabitants have blue Israeli ID cards. Yasser, 19, was one of them – a resident of Israel.

The first video clip – from a security camera – that we saw during our visit this week shows the café before soldiers’ incursion; a second one, with a view of the street, shows the young men running for their lives from the troops.

After they left the café and turned right onto the main road – the Ramallah-Jerusalem road, which passes through the Qalandiyah checkpoint – they spotted an army jeep at the entrance to the camp. No Palestinian wants to tangle with Israeli soldiers in a dark corner in pre-dawn hours. So the young men immediately turned around and headed back where they’d come from. Yasser, the last to leave the café, was also the last to turn back.

The jeep began to drive toward him and he tried to flee, but then the vehicle’s door opened and a soldier stepped out and fired a single shot, hitting Yasser in the lower back. The shot is audible in the video. His friends picked him up quickly, but after a few meters he slipped from their hands. Again they picked him up, but the soldiers fired tear-gas grenades at them to scare them off. Even aiding a wounded friend is forbidden around here, by order – the occupier’s order.

Finally Yasser was bundled into a car, which sped through the camp’s side streets to the Ramallah Governmental Hospital. Yasser was unconscious but still had a pulse. The bullet had exited from his stomach, dragging part of the intestines with it. He was rushed to surgery and died the next morning, on Friday, September 20.

Holograms of Yasser’s image in different hues now shimmer in the memorial corner his father has created in the foyer of the family’s apartment, located just a few meters away from where he was killed, near the entrance to the camp. There are also photos of him with his older brother, Samad, who’s 24. The two brothers, who also have four sisters, were especially close. They were, says their father Raad now, “more than connected, more than brothers – they were both brothers and close friends.”

Only a month after the fact did Samad learn of Yasser’s death. The older brother has been incarcerated for exactly a year in Nafha Prison, in the Negev, awaiting his trial in Jerusalem on charges of security offenses. His parents haven’t seen him since he was taken away. After they drove to a court session a few days ago to see their son at least via video from his cell – which is how his trial is proceeding – they were told that he was ill and would not be appearing that day.

Samad had previously been held in administrative detention – incarceration without trial – for a few months. Yasser had never been arrested. Samad has a 5-month-old son, named Raad after his grandfather, whom he has never seen. Israel doesn’t permit Palestinian prisoners to communicate with their loved ones in any way; all family visits were canceled when the war in Gaza broke out last year. Even when someone’s beloved brother is killed, he is not informed. Samad only learned of Yasser’s death from newly arrived prisoners at Nafha.

The Matar family’s home in the camp is small but attractively furnished and tidy; a broad wooden balcony offers a view of the Judean Hills. Raad, 53, is employed by the Palestinian Authority. He’s muscular, nattily dressed, with glossy hair. The youngest child, Tala, has come home from school wearing a traditional skirt: It’s olive harvest day and the children went out to the groves. Tala is 8 years old, in the third grade. The whole family has the Israeli ID cards of East Jerusalemites. The part of Qalandiyah that they live in is ostensibly part of Jerusalem, like the adjacent neighborhood, Kafr Akeb.

Yasser worked in a small aluminum factory in central Israel; Raad can’t recall exactly where. He left every morning at 5 in the factory’s van, which has Israeli plates, picked up a few other workers, crossed over into Israel at the Na’alin checkpoint and drove to the center of the country. He did so on that Thursday, too, his last morning. He got home as usual that day around 5 P.M., showered, ate and rested, and at around 8 o’clock went to the café, which is owned by his imprisoned brother. In Samad’s absence, a cousin is running the place. Yasser frequented it mostly on Thursdays, helping with management and hanging out with friends until first light. They played cards, snooker, PlayStation, drank coffee and smoked water pipes. When Yasser left home that afternoon his father hadn’t yet returned from work.

Their last conversation was sometime after 8 P.M., when Yasser told his father he was at the café with friends. They would never see or speak to each other again.

Raad talks calmly about his son except at one point, when I ask him what Yasser’s life plans were. There’s a flicker of a smile, then silence prevails. Raad is trying to hold back his tears. He leaves the room, probably so that we won’t see him crying.

Raad had gone out with friends in Ramallah that night. At about 3:30 A.M. he received a message from relatives saying that Yasser had been wounded. He rushed to the hospital to see his son being wheeled into the operating room; he then rushed home to pick up his wife Kifah, who’s 47. Mohammed Rumana, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, who was in the hospital at the time looking after his mother, relates that Yasser suffered from a gaping wound that had torn his internal organs apart.

Rumana’s investigation found that no disturbances and no provocative acts against the soldiers were reported in Qalandiyah in the hours prior to the incident in which Yasser was fatally shot. The video clip shows him and his friends running out into the street, with nothing in their hands. It thus appears to have been an execution, without cause.

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit this week issued the following response to Haaretz: “During joint activity of the security forces in the area of Qalandiyah and Kafr Akeb, a force responded with gunfire at a person who was throwing explosive devices. A hit was observed. The claim that a 19-year-old was hit during the disturbance is known to the authorities. The incident is being investigated by the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division, and at its conclusion the findings will be passed on for further examination.”

Raad shows us two photos in the memorial corner: his two sons, Yasser and Samad, side by side, with Yasser carrying his nephew, Samad’s newborn. The baby’s father is in prison, his uncle is dead. The red doors of the café where he spent his last hours were shuttered this week when we visited.

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