Weeks later, no one can explain why Israeli troops killed yet another unarmed Palestinian boy

Rashid and Wafa Jazar, with a poster of their son Ahmad, at home in the village of Sebastia, March 2025

Gideon Levy writes in Haaretz on 7 March 2025:

A heartbreaking parting shot of Ahmad Jazar, taken the day before he was killed. His mother’s hand is on his shoulder, as if she is about to hug him; they both smile slightly as they look straight into the camera. The photo was taken by Ahmad’s older sister, Mira, an interior design student of 19, in Nablus, when Ahmad was visiting his mother. Ahmad had asked his sister to take their picture. No one imagined that it would be his last.

The next day, January 19, Ahmad was shot by an Israel Defense Forces soldier from a distance of a few dozen meters, in his hometown of Sebastia, in the northern West Bank. At the time, he was standing near the entrance to a kindergarten run by the international Save the Children organization. Images of cheerful children, naïve and colorful, adorn the stone fence around the building. Next to it Ahmad, a 15-year-old boy from a poor family, collapsed to the ground, bleeding, and died.

Three days later, Mira had the photograph printed, added a white heart to it and placed it below the large poster of her brother, as part of an impromptu memorial corner in the living room.

In Sebastia, near Nablus, settlers founded a veritable land of settlements. It was the old, abandoned Ottoman-era train station near the village that members of the Gush Emunim organization converged upon during the summer of 1969 – accompanied by three future prime ministers: Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert – and took over.

The agreement devised that same year, sometimes referred to as the Sebastia compromise (which was no compromise at all), left the settlers there even after they were supposed to evacuate, serving as a harbinger of a sprawling settlement enterprise in all of Shomron, aka Samaria. Fifty-six years later, the IDF is killing children there, in the northern part of the West Bank.

Sebastia is the site of the biblical city of Shomron, whose ruins lie on the edges of the Palestinian village; access to that area has been denied to its inhabitants since last July. Meanwhile, about seven kilometers away, looms the settlement of Shavei Shomron.

When we were driving in the area this week, all the Palestinian cars on the road were blocked by an armored military vehicle parked diagonally across it, in order to clear the way for two vehicles of settlers heading north, toward the settlement of Homesh. It’s obvious who the lords of the land are here.

In his office, the head of the Sebastia village council, Mahmoud Azzam, shows us video clips of settlers attacking his village. Not a day goes by without assaults by such marauders or an incursion by the army, he says. “Since the war in Gaza started,” he adds, “there’s nothing easier for Israelis than to shoot Palestinians. Since October 7, they have also begun to lay their hands on our land.”

Sebastia is a colorful village which, in an alternative universe, would be a thriving tourist site – a combination of ancient stone structures and more recent historical attractions. Local residents run two nicely kept guest houses, but tourists and pilgrims have not exactly been streaming there in the past year and a half.

The army raided Sebastia once again on January 19. The evening before, a few young people had gathered in the local café, the other inhabitants were ensconced at home. Not much goes on after dark here.

An apartment in an old, two-story stone house with an arched ceiling and newly plastered walls, in the center of the village. We were there this week together with Salma a-Deb’i, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. The bereaved and impoverished Jazar family had moved in just a few days earlier, thanks to financial help from a relative and some other residents.

Rashid, the father, 57, is a house painter who worked for years in Israel but who, like all other West Bank Palestinians, hasn’t been able to enter the country since October 7. On October 5, 2023, he was still working in Petah Tikva, doing renovations for a Jewish contractor. He hasn’t been back since and has been deprived of his livelihood. He and his wife, Wafa, 40, have eight children.

The family’s dire economic situation forced them to live separately during the last 17 months. Wafa and seven of the children moved to Nablus, where she found a job as a seamstress, while Rashid and Ahmad lived in a tiny one-room apartment in Sebastia. Ahmad attended school until seventh grade, when he dropped out to help provide for the family. He tried living in Nablus with his mother but didn’t like it, so he moved back home, where he and his father took odd jobs.

They had no work on that particular Sunday, and Ahmad got up at midday. Rashid recalls that his son went to visit friends and afterward to eat hummus and falafel. The boy spent the afternoon, his last, at home, playing on his phone. At about 6:30 P.M. he told his father that he was going to the café, a short walk from their home. Afterward he went to buy pita at the only grocery store still willing to sell to the family on credit.

On his way he heard that the army had entered the village. “He’s a kid, it’s not like with you and me,” his father explains in his workers’ Hebrew. “He hears the army’s around and beats it home.” Rashid himself had gone to a different café in the village, across from the council building, to pass the time. At about 8 o’clock, some young people arrived and announced that someone had been wounded by the soldiers. They didn’t tell him that it was his son.

Ahmad had apparently been standing out on the street, not far from the kindergarten, a few dozen meters from four soldiers and their jeep. One of them fired a few shots at him – it’s still not clear why – and a bullet struck him in the chest. The rest hit the walls and fence. We saw the holes this week; fortunately there was no one in the kindergarten at that hour.

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit made do with the following response this week: “In the wake of the incident, an investigation was launched by the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division. Naturally, we cannot elaborate on an ongoing investigation.”

So at present it’s impossible to go into detail, and if and when the “ongoing investigation” concludes one day, no one will be interested in why soldiers killed yet another unarmed youth who by chance was standing somewhere near them.

Ahmad collapsed and was immediately carried away by a few youths who were standing nearby, behind a concrete wall. By that time Rashid had also arrived. A private vehicle rushed the teenager, lying on his father’s lap, to Al-Najah Hospital in Nablus. Ahmad was dead on arrival, but the physicians nevertheless tried to revive him and told his father that with God’s help, the boy would survive.

But, says Rashid, “I told myself right away: It’s over. His story is over.” A few minutes later, a doctor emerged and said, “God took Ahmad.” Ahmad’s mother, who was in her Nablus home, arrived minutes later, accompanied by four of her children. She tells us she passed out when she heard the news.

Wafa, a woman of few words, was a study in black this week, her face etched in agony. After the catastrophe that befell them, she left her job in the city and moved back to Sebastia with her remaining children to live with her husband, in the apartment a relative gave them. Villagers have joined forces to cover their symbolic rent.

For her part, Wafa explains that she left Nablus to be near Ahmad: She visits his grave every day.

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