Eyewitnesses say Muhammad al-Halaq stood with his arms folded, posing no threat, when a single, deadly shot was fired. The soldiers later appeared to celebrate. The IDF said the incident is under review
A large banner, bearing the image of a boy in a brightly colored sweat suit, covers the bed. A new blue backpack lies at the head of the bed, a white garment at its foot. A woman is standing there, sobbing, her gaze fixated on the image of her son. There is not a dry eye around her.
The bed belongs to Muhammad al-Hallaq, a 9-year-old who was in fourth grade. He received the backpack the day he was killed. The white garment is the festive outfit he wore in the local mosque during the Friday prayers. The tearful woman next to the bed is Alia, his mother, an impressive woman of 33, the mother of four, including the dead boy.
An Israel Defense Forces soldier shot and killed the boy last Thursday, October 16, as he stood quietly, at a distance from the force. In a video taken by a passerby he’s seen for an instant on the edge of the frame, a little boy standing in the street, wearing a blue T-shirt shirt, seconds before his death.
The soldiers fired dozens of rounds into the air, scaring off children who were playing soccer on the basketball court of the local girls’ school nearby. Terrified, the children scattered. Muhammad also fled to the street and stood next to a stone wall, arms folded on his chest. Apparently he thought there was no reason to keep running: The soldiers were far away, the street was quiet.
But one of the soldiers decided to teach the boy a lesson. According to the testimony of eyewitnesses Haaretz spoke to, the soldier knelt, aimed and fired a single shot. The bullet struck Muhammad in the right hip and exited from the left hip after ravaging major blood vessels and organs. Muhammad didn’t stand a chance. He managed to take a step or two, collapsed and tried to crawl on the ground, until he stopped moving.
About an hour and a half later he was pronounced dead at the hospital. He was the third child of the al-Hallaqs, an impoverished family living in the remote village of al-Rihiya, south of Hebron.
The IDF had no reason to raid the village, still less to kill a child. This is yet another case of the incursion of the war in Gaza into the West Bank. What’s allowed there is allowed here, too: killing for the sake of killing, even of young children for whose blood Satan has not yet devised revenge, as the poet wrote.
To Haaretz’s query as to whether the soldier who killed the boy had been detained for questioning, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit offered its usual response. The one generic sentence – “The event is known and is under examination by the Military Advocate General’s unit” – was apparently sufficient to acknowledge the army’s moral imperative with respect to the killing of an innocent child. In another year or two the case will be closed on grounds of lack of public interest.
And the soldier – what will happen to him? Will he remember the angelic youngster he killed in cold blood? Will he remember him when he is the father of a child of the same age? Will the dead boy appear in his dreams? His nightmares? Does he have any notion of the disaster he has inflicted on this hardscrabble family? Or maybe he’s already forgotten the whole thing. The fact is he wasn’t even interrogated. Killing a little boy like this is of no consequence to the IDF and perhaps not to the soldier who pulled the trigger either.
Eyewitnesses told us that after the soldier fired he raised his arms in a gesture of apparent joy; his buddies joined in the gaiety. Then they fired tear-gas grenades at some of the locals who tried to save the boy, before leaving a few minutes later.
About 7,000 people live in al-Rihiya. The route to the village is tortuous thanks to the abundance of abandoned checkpoints that have sprung up in the two years since the outbreak of the war in Gaza Strip. One must find one’s way through the labyrinthine streets of the Al-Fawar refugee camp, which is also almost completely sealed off from the world.
The parents are sitting in the mourning tent erected next to their home. The father, Bahjat, 38, worked for years in construction projects in Israel; now he’s employed at a supermarket in a refugee camp near Ramallah. The distance from home, and the myriad checkpoints, compel him to spend the week in the camp and to come home only on weekends.
On the day his son was killed, Bahjat told us when we visited this week, he was also at work. The panicky, nightmarish journey to reach his son, after he was originally told that the boy had been wounded, took three hours. In an al-Rihiya WhatsApp group he saw a clip of Muhammad being carried by his uncle to the latter’s car, bleeding from the hip, his head dangling. He knew the boy’s fate was sealed. Three hours passed before he saw the body: He had been forced to wait more than an hour at the so-called container checkpoint that slices the West Bank in two, as soldiers lethargically checked car after car, as usual.
That morning Muhammad left home escorting his little sister Sila, a 6-year-old who is in first grade, to the girls school which is next to his school. At the end of the day he collected her as usual and the two went home. Proudly he showed off the new backpack and pencil case he and his classmates received as gifts from UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, whose logo is emblazoned on them.
Muhammad’s mother shows them to us. His notebooks and textbooks are still inside, including the arithmetic notebook, in which comments in red were written by the teacher on what would be the last day of his life. In his pencil case are pens and pencils, and also a vial of perfume that he would use after putting on his festive white clothes for Friday prayers in the mosque. Alia strokes the little bottle, as though unwilling to part from it.
After Muhammad finished lunch on Thursday, a few of his friends came over and together they went to the girls school, which is about 1.5 kilometers (almost a mile) from his home; they play soccer on the basketball court there almost every day after school. It was about 2:30 P.M. when Muhammad left, never to return. At the same time, his mother went to the nearby city of Yatta with her father to do some shopping.
And the soldier – will he remember the angelic youngster he killed in cold blood? Will he remember him when he is the father of a child of the same age? Does he have any notion of the disaster he has inflicted on this hardscrabble family? Or maybe he’s already forgotten the whole thing.
At about 5 P.M. two IDF jeeps suddenly swept into the village. The kids were still on the basketball court. The soldiers fired shots into the air to disperse the local residents and make them go home, the way you chase away stray dogs. It’s become routine: The army invades this village three times a week on average, usually at night. This time its troops showed up in daylight.
The streets emptied out. The kids playing soccer also scattered. Muhammad fled the schoolyard together with them and stood near the wall. The soldiers were in the valley below, some 250 meters away. They shouted and fired into the air. Immediately afterward one of them apparently knelt and shot Muhammad.
The soldiers then fired four tear-gas grenades at passersby, leaving Muhammad to bleed for three-four minutes before it was possible to evacuate him.
One of the boy’s uncles, who lives nearby and saw what had happened, rushed out into the street and, together with his son, and carried Muhammad to the uncle’s car. A video shows the uncle bundling his nephew, who seems to be lifeless, into the car. This week the uncle – he is afraid to have his name published – related that he found a pulse in the child’s neck, albeit weak. He wanted to evacuate the boy to the government hospital in Yatta as fast as possible, but saw the same two jeeps he’d seen in al-Rihiya driving slowly in front of him. He was afraid the soldiers would delay him and might also abduct Muhammad, so he chose a bypass road that doubled the time of the trip: 30 minutes instead of 15.
Another cousin, Aiham, 19, told us that he saw the moment at which Muhammad was hit, from the roof of his house. He related that the soldiers raised their arms in what looked to him like a gesture of triumph or joy. Other eyewitnesses confirmed this to Manal al-Jabari, the Hebron-area field researcher for B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. They also told her that the security camera installed on a street that overlooks the site of the shooting had been removed sometime later by soldiers.
When the uncle arrived at Abu Hasan Qassem Hospital in Yatta, he thought his nephew’s heart had stopped beating. The physicians tried to resuscitate Muhammad and rushed him to the operating room, but it was too late. That evening, a Shin Bet security service agent called the uncle to warn him and his family against organizing demonstrations during the funeral.
After Muhammad was shot, his father’s brother called Bahjat to say his son had been wounded; when he looked at the village’s WhatsApp group he realized that the boy was in critical condition. He remembers going into a state of shock. Residents of the Palestinian town of Idna volunteered to drive him home. At the end of the excruciatingly journey he arrived at the hospital at 8:30 P.M.
Alia was shopping in Yatta with her father when the events transpired, and when he got a phone call, she had a fearful feeling. When her father put the phone in his pocket, her anxiety grew. A relative was asking, “What’s happening in your neighborhood. Has someone been wounded?” Switching to her own phone, she saw the video of her dying son being placed in his uncle’s car.
The medical team at the hospital wouldn’t let Alia and her father into Muhammad’s room and tried to calm her down, saying that he had suffered a light wound. When they asked the family for blood donations, she thought there was still hope. It was only after some time that the physicians informed her that the bullet had ruptured major blood vessels and that her Muhammad was dead. He had once told his mother that he wanted to be a cardiologist when he grew up.
He was buried the same night in the village cemetery.
Now Alia is weeping, in her son’s bedroom; her teenage son Wajdi is mournful. All she wants now is for the soldier who shot and killed her son to be given the punishment he deserves. Her children aren’t sleeping anymore in their beds, next to Muhammad’s. They’re afraid.