‘The most peaceful person’: Umm Al-Khair mourns activist slain by Israeli settler
Awdah Hathaleen celebrates his 27th birthday with friends, in Um Al-Khair, the West Bank.
Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham and Oren Ziv report in +972 on 20 July 2025:
Yesterday evening, an Israeli settler shot dead the Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen in his community of Umm Al-Khair, in the southern occupied West Bank. Known to many international solidarity activists and foreign diplomats for his steadfast non-violent resistance to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian communities of Masafer Yatta, the 31-year-old was critically wounded by a bullet that penetrated his lung, and he died before reaching the hospital.
Hathaleen’s suspected killer, Yinon Levi, is also well-known to Palestinians and solidarity activists in the region. The founder of the Meitarim Farm outpost and owner of an earthworks company regularly contracted by the Israeli authorities to demolish Palestinian property, Levi has been documented carrying out violent attacks in Palestinian communities with the aim of driving them off their land — including Khirbet Zanuta, one of several villages whose residents were expelled by settlers in the first weeks of the Gaza war.
Levi has been sanctioned by the EU, the UK, France, and Canada; the Biden administration also sanctioned him last year, but U.S. President Donald Trump rescinded all sanctions on Israeli settlers soon after returning to office.
Levi claimed he opened fire in Umm Al-Khair because he had been assaulted by “dozens of rioters” throwing stones, and Honenu, a far-right organization providing him with legal support, described the incident as an attempted “lynching.” A spokesperson for the settlement of Carmel, on whose behalf Levi was likely carrying out excavation work, said it “could have ended in the murder of a Jew if he had not defended himself.”
However, an examination by +972 and Local Call of around 20 videos from the incident makes clear that it was the settlers who attacked the Palestinian residents, not the other way around.
Metadata from the video footage shows that the shooting occurred at 5:29 p.m. Four minutes earlier, Levi entered privately-owned Palestinian land in Umm Al-Khair, accompanied by an excavator driver. The driver plowed through olive trees, destroyed the village’s fence and main water pipe, and attempted to run over Hathaleen’s cousin, Ahmad, striking him in the head with the excavator’s arm and knocking him unconscious. Only then did several other residents begin throwing stones at the excavator.