IDF soldiers in an ambush rained fire down on a trio of 14-year-old Palestinian Americans who may have been throwing stones, but harmlessly. Two escaped, wounded; the third was killed after being sprayed with bullets
A brightly lit, elegant, spacious living room. Hanging on the cream-colored wall is a gilded map of Palestine, with an image of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque at the top and a photograph of a dead boy in the center. It is flanked by large flags – of Palestine and the United States – on either side. The last photo ever taken of young Amer, leaning on a white Mercedes, is the one on the map; another picture, taken by a friend, is perched below on a small table wedged between two light-brown, velvet armchairs. There is something formal about the atmosphere here.
There’s another memorial corner set up on a table at the other end of the room, displaying remnants of a life – a certificate of excellence from school, photos and texts dedicated to Amer Rabee, who never made it to his 15th birthday because he was shot to death by soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces.
Whether Amer was throwing stones at the road or not, the soldiers’ sheer rage, their trigger-happy lust for revenge apparently knew no bounds on that day in early April. In footage taken at the scene, 36 gunshots can be heard – they are counted by a special app installed in the bereaved father’s phone – and then there are another 11 shots. The soldiers’ weapons were trained on three ninth-graders, all of whom hold U.S. citizenship, who were playing outdoors and perhaps also throwing stones that didn’t endanger a soul.
The soldiers could have taken the youths into custody, or could have wounded them, but there was no cause to kill anyone. All the indications are that Amer was executed in cold blood. What other way is there to describe the pumping of 11 bullets into a 14-year-old’s body?
Turmus Ayya, where the dead boy’s family lives, is one of the most affluent and tranquil villages in the territories. Some 85 percent of the locals are U.S. citizens; most of their luxurious homes are empty, used only when the family from America comes to visit. This week, too, when we visited, quiet reigned on the streets.
Mohammed Rabee, 48, a father of five, including the dead son, and a grandfather of six, was born here to a Palestinian father and a Brazilian-born mother, who decided to return to the family’s ancestral village from Brazil. In 2001, Mohammed and his wife, Majed, who’s now 43, moved to New York. He owned clothing shops in Queens and later in the Bronx, and in 2006 joined his brother’s construction company, which operated in New York and New Jersey. Amer, the youngest, was born in Hackensack.
Three years later, the family returned to Turmus Ayya because Mohammed wanted Amer to develop a Palestinian identity and absorb Palestinian culture. The boy grew up in the West Bank town, but remained fluent in English. Amer’s four older siblings remained in the United States; two of his brothers still work in the family’s construction business.
Once a year, on average, the family visits their relatives in America. Amer was in New Jersey in January and wanted to stay and work with his brothers, but Mohammed said he had to complete high school before moving to America.
In the meantime, Mohammed helped his son set up an online company that would sell, via Amazon, machines that one can use at home to make cotton candy, which in Arabic is called “women’s hair.” An order had already been placed for 500 units from China, and the launch was supposed to take place soon. On the morning of the day he died, Amer woke his mother and asked her for a photocopy of her passport – the Amazon application was in her name because he was a minor.
Amer’s bedroom tells the story: a huge television screen, a laptop and a PlayStation. A family video shows him using all three – and smiling at the camera. He wanted to be a businessman and later to study medicine.
Sunday, April 6, was the day when work and school were resumed following the Eid al-Fitr holiday marking the end of Ramadan. Unusually, Amer woke up by himself, instead of his mother having to rouse him. His father was at the construction site of the new home he is building in the village. He returned in the afternoon and went to sleep.
Amer came home from school, ate lunch, went to his tutor for help studying for an exam and then went with two friends to the “forbidden zone”: the groves of olive and almond trees on the outskirts of Turmus Ayya. Since the Gaza war started, and even before, local residents have been barred from accessing some of their trees, those close to Highway 60 – the main West Bank thoroughfare – because of stone throwing incidents there.
Mohammed says Amer and his friends assumed that their U.S. citizenship protected them. “The army knows that any attack on residents of Turmus Ayya is an attack on Americans,” he tells us.
At 6:30 P.M., Mohammed was awakened by a phone call. A friend told him that there were problems in the neighborhood and that Amer might be involved. Mohammed has two family-location safety apps, enabling him to know where his son is at all times. Whenever settlers in nearby Shiloh Valley have run amok in the village (the Rabees’ farmhouse was torched last June, and even though the incident was filmed by the security cameras, no one was arrested) – and whenever the army has launched its raids, Mohammed has kept close tabs on Amer. But on that black Sunday he was having his afternoon nap.
After the phone call he activated his Life360 tracking app and went out into the street, but his son wasn’t where the app indicated he would be. He called Amer but got no answer, and finally went to Istishari Hospital in Ramallah, where he had heard that two people wounded by the army had been evacuated. The two turned out to be Amer’s friends. They told him Amer had been wounded but that they had fled because the soldiers kept on shooting at them. Amer remained behind; they had no idea what had happened.
Mohammed called the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem to report that his son was missing. Naively, he thought the consulate’s task was to see to the safety of its citizens, but the official only asked for some general details. It wasn’t until around 10 P.M. – which turned out to be three-and-a-half hours after Amer had been shot to death – that the Palestinian District Coordination and Liaison Office informed Mohammed that a message had been received from the Israeli authorities, confirming that his son had been killed. Mohammed was told to go to the IDF base at Hawara, near Nablus, to take custody of the body. Mohammed believes, with good justification, that if his son weren’t an American his body would not have been returned.
Mohammed demanded to see the body, which was naked and wrapped in plastic. He counted 11 gunshot wounds, seven of them in the upper body: two in the chest, two in the shoulders, two in the neck. In addition, a dumdum (expanding) bullet, had shattered the skull.
In the recording of the shooting, transmitted via an app, 36 shots can be heard, then there’s a pause and then another 11 shots. The shooting came from soldiers lying in ambush; they were on the opposite side of Highway 60 from the youths. Mohammed thinks the troops crossed over afterward and shot his wounded son at point-blank range to confirm the kill.
The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit chose to ignore these allegations this week and only referred Haaretz to the original communiqué that was issued on the day of the killing: “During operational activity by fighters from Unit 636 in the Turmus Ayya area in [the sector of the] Samaria Brigade, the force identified three terrorists who were hurling rocks at a highway where civilian vehicles travel. The fighters fired at the terrorists, who constituted a danger to the civilians, eliminated one of them and hit the two other terrorists.”
The communiqué was accompanied by a blurred video showing figures in the dark throwing something, but it doesn’t look as if it was rocks. Regardless, Mohammed says, it would have been enough for the soldiers to shout at or warn the three friends, or to detain them. But 36 bullets? And 11 into his son’s body?
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy called Mohammed to express his condolences, and Senators Andy Kim and Cory Booker wrote a joint letter to President Donald Trump, recounting the story of the killing of a son of New Jersey, Amer Rabee, and the wounding of his two friends, one of whom is also a New Jersey native, demanding the administration’s intervention.
“We are calling for a thorough and transparent accounting of the facts and circumstances around Amer Rabee’s death and the actions of Israeli security forces,” they wrote, adding, “we urge your administration to conduct a timely, independent and transparent investigation into Amer Rabee’s death as well as Ayub Igbara and Abed Shehada’s injuries… We urge your administration to raise this case at the highest levels during meetings with counterparts in the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority and press for full cooperation with a U.S.-led investigation.”
“This is how you plant hatred in our children,” Mohammed says. “Who is fighting you now in Gaza? Those whose families you killed in 2014. In one instant, the soldiers arouse greater hatred here than 10 years of Hamas incitement.”
We then went to see the site of the incident with Mohammad Romaneh, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, but could not access it: One mustn’t approach the groves by the roadside, because the army has a base on the hill opposite and opens fire at anyone who dares to draw near.
But from a distance, we viewed the place where Amer Rabee was shot. A strange quiet hovered over the site, broken only by the faint roar of cars hurtling along the highway.
- Photo: “The guest room of the Rabee family, this week in Turmus Ayya. The family returned from the U.S. so that their son could absorb Palestinian identity.Credit: Alex Levac