A Palestinian Teen Was Standing on the Street With His Scooter When Israeli Troops Shot Him Dead

Here’s where Qais stood, and here lies his scooter – an old Bird electric model that his father bought him a year ago for 400 shekels (about $115), making him the envy of all the kids in the neighborhood. Now all that remains is an improvised monument with a photo of the deceased on this traffic island, opposite the Mega supermarket and the Mega-Land amusement park, near the center of Tul Karm in the northern West Bank. The road around the island, leading out of the city in the direction of the village of Shuweika, is normally busy and crowded, but it was virtually deserted last Monday when we stopped there to reconstruct the circumstances in which 14-year-old Qais Nasrallah was killed. On Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces had once again raided the two local refugee camps, Tul Karm and Nur Shams. People are afraid to be out on the streets, even if they’re a few kilometers away from the sites of clashes between the army and armed militants. That was also the case on April 19, a Friday, when soldiers killed Qais.

As we stood on the traffic island this week, with Abdulkarim Sadi, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, an electric scooter suddenly approached us. The rider, a young man in a military-style windbreaker and jeans, was 19-year-old Leith, Qais’ eldest sibling – there are also three sisters – who had been given his dead brother’s scooter. Leith placed the scooter on the spot where his brother was shot; momentarily, it became part of the memorial. The signs around the traffic circle nearby are all covered with photographs of Qais. A sculpture of butterflies stands across the way.

The dead boy’s home is about 100 meters from where he was killed. Sadi estimates that the shot that killed Qais was fired from a distance of 320 meters. At that range, there was no way the kid with the scooter could have posed a threat of any kind to the soldiers. But these are days of war in Gaza, and troops in the West Bank also apparently like to shoot and kill indiscriminately, like their buddies in the Strip.