A Palestinian boy was shot by Israeli troops in front of his father and died in his brother’s arms

Amro Najar.

Gideon Levy reports in Haaretz on 16 March 2024:

Bleeding profusely, the 10-year-old boy slumps into the arms of his 7-year-old brother, who is sitting next to him in the front seat of their father’s pickup. A bullet had slammed into the older boy’s head. The appalled father opens the passenger door to pull his son out of the vehicle. “Amro is dead! Amro is dead!” he screams. Horrified, the younger brother leaps out and runs off, quickly disappearing. As the father screams hysterically, local residents take his wounded son from him and rush the boy to a hospital in Nablus, where he is pronounced dead. Soldiers manning a local checkpoint will later prevent the mother from getting to the hospital in order part from her dead son.

Minutes after that incident, Israel Defense Forces soldiers shoot another young person in the same village. Aged 20, he died from his wounds two days later.

Such is the routine of life – and of death – these days in the West Bank, during the war in Gaza, when all constraints have been removed and Palestinians everywhere are fair game, not only in the Strip.

The Najar family lives in the last house at the southern edge of the village of Burin, near the road that ascends to the settlement of Yitzhar, whose inhabitants have inflicted violence on their Palestinian neighbors for years. It is thus not surprising that their house looks like a military facility: fences, bars on windows, barbed wire and iron lattices – all to protect the family from the settlers, who have been walking around in army uniforms since the outbreak of the war. They’re members of so-called emergency security squads, the latest invention of the occupation, but actually the uniforms are largely a military disguise for the most violent of settlers in the West Bank, who continue to terrorize the defenseless occupied population.

In addition to the access road to Yitzhar, an IDF guard tower is also visible from the Najars’ yard, but the soldiers posted there only care about the settlers’ welfare and security – never about protecting their victims. According to members of the family, not a day goes by without uniformed settlers showing up outside the house, cursing, frightening the children, sometimes throwing stones and torching property. The burned children’s bicycles tossed on the other side of the fence are mute testament of life in their neighborhood in Burin.

While fear of settlers and the specter of their terror have for years plagued this home, no one imagined that one of the children living there would be killed by the soldiers who invade the village to flaunt their control and exercise intimidation. Instead of patrolling in Yitzhar, the soldiers are apparently targeting the settlers’ victims.

At the Najars’, a rust-colored cat is warming itself in the spring sunshine along with the grandmother, her legs resting on a plastic bucket and a cane leaning by her side, her face a study in agony over the grandson who was killed. At 80, Imbassam has seen everything relating to the occupation. In February 2003, during one of the many pogroms unleashed against Burin – as Abdulkarim Sai, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, recalls – settlers tried to set this house on fire by blowing up a cooking-gas canister. No one was hurt.

The grieving parents, Salam and Mohammed Najar, 30 and 37 years old, respectively, raised a family of four children – three sons and a daughter. Salam speaks fluent Hebrew. Where did she learn the language? From Israeli television. Born in the nearby village of Jit, she says she loved the children’s channel. It had shows like “In Hani’s Room” and “Mrs. Pepperpot,” and she also remembers the songs. “My father worked in Israel, but he knew less Hebrew than me and my sisters. We had very good Hebrew.”

Mohammed delivers food to grocery stores. His old rundown Mercedes 418 pickup, in which 10-year-old Amro was shot, is now parked in the yard, its front windshield punctured by a bullet. It’s daytime during Ramadan, so no refreshments are served to guests.

It was March 4, a Monday. Mohammed drove the children to school in the morning and they were picked up afterward by Salam. Always anxious about their safety, she makes a point of bringing them home every day, even though the school is only a kilometer away, because she doesn’t want them walking alone.

In the eyes of its residents, Burin is a firing zone. Two weeks ago, while the Najar children were playing in the yard, some uniformed settlers came down from the hill nearby and ordered them into the house at gunpoint. The children fled. Sama, the 9-year-old daughter, screamed with fear. Unlike most of the homes in Palestinian villages, the doors of the Najars’ house are locked at all times. “More than 12 years I’ve lived here, and I have never felt safe,” Salam says.

That Monday, she made lunch for the children and they changed their clothes. When Mohammed came home in the afternoon, he suggested their two sons, Amro and Ahmed, go with him to run a couple of errands in the village center. The cell phone of one of the children, which is used for online learning at school, needed repair, and a canister of cooking gas had to be replaced.

They left the house at 4:20 P.M. It wasn’t long before the phone was repaired and they had the new cannister, and the threesome made their way home leisurely. Mohammed had no idea that an army force was in Burin. Suddenly Salam called: A relative living nearby had noticed troops moving toward the center of the village and posted an update on social media. Don’t leave the house, he warned. Salam immediately passed the message on to her husband.

Amro and Ahmed were sitting side by side in the front seat of the Mercedes. Mohammed stopped driving and waited to see what was going on. He didn’t see any soldiers, but decided to wait. Traffic had ground to a halt; everyone was apparently seized by fear. Mohammed, in addition to B’Tselem field researcher Sadi and his colleague Salma a-Deb’i, insist that no violent incidents occurred at the place where the pickup had stopped – neither stone throwing nor anything else. Mohammed waited with the boys for about seven minutes, he recalls, until he saw that traffic had returned to normal, whereupon he resumed driving home.

But then he noticed people running toward his truck, and a few hiding behind it. While trying to size up the situation, he heard the sound of gunfire. The windshield in front of Mohammed was pierced by a bullet that apparently veered off to the side and slammed into the head of Amro, sitting next to him. During the first instant the father could not grasp what was happening, but then he saw Amro lying in the arms of little Ahmed, a gaping wound in his head.

Screaming wildly, Mohammed darted out of the vehicle so as to pull out his bleeding son out from the other side, and Ahmed ran off in abject panic. Mohammed was crazed and passersby took Amro from him and drove toward Rafidia Hospital in Nablus, some nine kilometers (about six miles) away. Due to a series of checkpoints and other obstacles, Nablus is presently one of the most inaccessible cities in the West Bank. The car transporting Amro was delayed by soldiers and the boy was pronounced dead on arrival. Salam never made it to the hospital.

Not long after the incident with Amro, we were told, soldiers opened fire from a spot that’s about 50 meters away. Another villager, Ahmed Kadis, was shot in the head. Seriously wounded, he somehow managed to get to a nearby house, from which he was rushed to the hospital. But he also didn’t survive.

Moreover, according to testimonies collected by Deb’i, of B’Tselem, soldiers entered a café in the village and beat a few of the young customers there. Two were taken to the hospital. The troops forced a 14-year-old, Baher Eid, to lie on the floor, and a soldier stepped on his neck.

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit stated this week, in response to a query from Haaretz: “On March 4, 2024, during activity initiated by the IDF in the village of Burin, in [the territory of] the Shomron [Samaria] Brigade, a number of suspects threw stones at the fighters, who responded with gunfire. Shortly afterward, the death of a Palestinian minor was reported; a few days later, a report was received of the death of another Palestinian, who was wounded in the incident and succumbed to his wounds. In the wake of the incident, an investigation was launched by the Military Police. Upon its conclusion, the findings will be transmitted to the military advocate general’s office.”

The bloodstains on the seat of the Mercedes in the yard have been scrubbed away. Little Ahmed has been wracked by nightmares since the incident. He was found by his uncle 20 minutes after witnessing the killing of his brother, hiding in the yard of a house, clutching a coin his father had given to him to buy something to drink on the way home, weeping uncontrollably. Amro had been killed because of him, his brother wailed. On the day we visited the family, last Monday, Ahmed was curled up in Amro’s blanket and, as his mother had told us, refused to be separated from it.

“For me, everything that was beautiful is over,” she said, and fell silent.

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