A settler shot a Palestinian father in the leg. Soldiers arrived to detain his son
Israeli soldiers prevent witnesses from helping Sheikh Saeed Rabaa after he was shot in the leg, Al-Rakeez, 17 April 2025
Basel Adra reports in +972 on 22 April 2025:
At around 6:30 p.m. on April 17, 16-year-old Ilyas Saeed Rabaa spotted three armed Israeli settlers near his family’s land in Al-Rakeez, a quiet village in the Masafer Yatta region of the South Hebron Hills.
The settlers, equipped with a generator and power drill, were preparing to implant iron pillars on farmland that Ilyas’s 60-year-old father, Sheikh Saeed Rabaa, had cultivated with olive trees since 2012. “I saw them near our home,” Ilyas recalled. “I ran to my father and told him, and we both went out to confront them.”
As the two approached, tensions escalated quickly. According to Ilyas and Saeed, the settlers — one of whom they recognized as a security guard from a nearby outpost — claimed the land as their own. Ilyas began filming the encounter with his phone when one of the settlers attacked him from behind, seized the phone, and pinned him to the ground, choking him.
“I ran to help my son, yelling at the settler to stop,” Saeed told +972. “Then the guard fired a shot into the air, and another into my leg.”
Saeed collapsed instantly. Bleeding heavily, he pressed his hands against the wound in an effort to stop the flow. Meanwhile, his son lay with his head pushed into the dirt, screaming, “They shot my father! They shot my father!”