The last time Nassar al-Hammouni talked to his son, Ayman, it was by telephone and the 12-year-old was overflowing with plans for the coming weekend, and for the rest of his life. He had joined a local football team and planned to register at a karate club that weekend. When he grew up, he told Nassar, he was going to become a doctor, or better still an engineer to help his father in the construction job that took him away from their home in Hebron every week.
None of that – the football, the karate or his imagined future career – will happen now. Last Friday, two days after the call to his father, Ayman was killed, shot by Israeli fire, video footage seen by the Guardian suggests.
The killing of children on the West Bank is no longer out of the ordinary, particularly since the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stepped up operations in the occupied territory after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 and the beginning of the Gaza war. The intensity has increased since the January ceasefire in the strip.
So far this year about two children a week have been killed, slightly over the average rate for 2024 when 93 children were killed. Human rights workers fear the numbers may continue to increase as the IDF brings Gaza techniques to the West Bank, ejecting tens of thousands of people from their homes, flattening districts and loosening further the “rules of engagement” covering when a soldier is permitted to open fire.
They are calling it “Gazafication” and it is becoming the new normal. But what sets Ayman al-Hammouni’s case apart is the clarity of the evidence, illustrated by footage from two security cameras, that tells the story of the child’s last moments.
Ayman and his 10-year-old brother, Aysar, had gone with their mother, Anwar, to visit their grandfather and their uncles who lived in another part of Hebron, Jabal Jawhar. The trip across town took an hour in Hebron’s grinding traffic and involved crossing from Palestinian-controlled Hebron to an area run by the IDF, part of the complex patchwork of territorial division imposed on the West Bank.
Jabal Jawhar is not far from the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham and his biblical family are supposedly buried, a site sacred to Muslims, Jews and Christians. On Friday nights before Jewish settlers come to pray there, the IDF has been conducting aggressive patrols in the surrounding Palestinian districts. The army, increasingly staffed and led by Israelis from the national religious right, is widely perceived on the West Bank to be acting as the armed wing of the settler movement.
At about 6.30pm, Ayman had just run an errand to his grandfather’s flat and returned to his uncle Tariq’s house when there was a commotion on the main road, 60 metres away down a sloping paved alleyway.
A shot was heard and people began to run, and a young man from the neighbourhood whose uncle lived next door drove up the alley in a white car, its windscreen pierced by a bullet. He parked outside Tariq’s house and got out, examining a wound where a fragment of glass had nicked his shoulder.
The scene was recorded by two security cameras, one at the corner of Tariq’s courtyard pointing down the alley, and the other perched outside the top-floor flat of Ayman’s grandfather, Mohammad Bader al-Ajlouni, looking over the cars in front of Tariq’s house and across the alley, at 90 degrees to the other camera angle.
Both sets of footage show Ayman and two of his cousins coming out of Tariq’s house along with another of his uncles, Nadeem al-Ajlouni, who gives the injured man a tissue for the cut in his shoulder. Ayman looks on, a slight figure leaning on the back of the white car, a brown bag slung around his shoulder.
Then there is more commotion from the alleyway and another shot, sending the small knot of people scurrying for cover, including Ayman and his cousins. Ayman runs inside the gate of Tariq’s house and out of view of the cameras, and then another shot rings out from down the alleyway. This was the bullet that is believed to have hit Ayman. The footage does not prove beyond question who fired it, but it does make clear it came from the direction of Israeli soldiers who were advancing on the house and who arrived at the scene seconds later.
In the confusion, it seems to take a few seconds before Ayman is noticed. It was Nadeem, his young uncle, who saw him first. “He was lying on the steps of the house, just inside the gate. I went to pick him up but I could tell he was already gone,” Nadeem said.
Then the cameras show another surge of panic and the silhouettes of three soldiers advancing up the alley, guns pointed, one with a bright torch shining along the barrel. The injured neighbour, Ayman’s cousin, and his little brother Aysar, who by now had come down from his grandfather’s flat, all scramble away between the parked cars. Nadeem runs out of Tariq’s front gate carrying Ayman but drops his jacket and then Ayman in his desperation to get away.
The boy’s body is left lying on the ground between a car and Tariq’s garden wall as the soldiers reach the house. They look around for a few seconds and then spot the body, and at that point they turn around and calmly walk away, the screams of Ayman’s mother at their backs after she stumbles on the body of her son.
Nadeem scoops Ayman’s limp body up once more and he and Tariq head off down the alley in the footsteps of the retreating soldiers, in the direction of a nearby hospital.
It was already too late. The family have yet to receive the medical report but an advocacy group, Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP), drawing on its contacts in the Hebron hospital where Ayman was taken, said the bullet entered his back and lodged in his lungs.
Nassar and Nadeem also said Ayman was shot in the back, while Mohammad, the grandfather, said the wound was to the upper abdomen.
Nassar got the call in Ramallah, where he works in a construction and a security job for the Palestinian Authority. First a relative told him Ayman had been shot, but Nassar demanded the truth and by the time he was on the road he already knew his son was dead.
A friend drove him through the night, navigating the army checkpoints along the way. At one spot north of Bethlehem, known as the “container checkpoint”, Nassar was told to get out of the car with a gun pointed at him.
The bereaved father said that on hearing of what had happened in Hebron, an Arabic-speaking soldier began to taunt him, claiming to have been the one who shot Ayman, telling Nassar: “Convince me that I shot him for nothing.
“We hope that you will follow your son,” he recalled the soldier adding.
The IDF did not respond to questions about Ayman’s death. In some previous cases, under media pressure an investigation is announced, although it rarely results in substantive action. In 2019 a soldier was sentenced to one month of community service for shooting dead a 14-year-old boy in Gaza. But even such trivial accountability is vanishingly rare.
An Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din, has calculated the probability of an Israeli soldier facing prosecution for killing Palestinians to be just 0.4% – one prosecution in 219 fatalities brought to the military’s attention.
On Wednesday, Aysar went back to school for the first time since the shooting, but he could not face seeing his older brother’s classroom across the corridor from his own. Nassar asked the teacher if he could be moved.
Ayman was a premature baby and was in a hospital incubator for more than a month, Nassar recalled. But being a child is not much of a protection on the West Bank.
“It is about rage and revenge,” Nassar said. “They don’t care if it’s a child, or a woman, or an old person. No one’s safe any more.”
