Israeli forces said they killed a ‘terrorist.' He was 14 years old.

Boston Globe

27-05-2025

The Israeli military has accused Amer and two of his friends of hurling rocks toward the highway and endangering civilians. It described the boys as 'terrorists,' and said its soldiers had 'eliminated' one and shot the two others.
Amer's family and one of the surviving boys deny the accusation, saying they were picking almonds. Amer was shot multiple times in his upper body, according to photographs his family shared with The New York Times.
Advertisement
Amer's killing has added to accusations that the Israeli military uses excessive force and operates with impunity. It came amid a sharp spike in violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, where the Israeli military has been carrying out raids and tightening control in the most sweeping crackdown on militancy there in a generation. Rampages by extremist settlers against Palestinians have also increased recently.
Advertisement
Amer's death has also raised questions about the US response to helping its own citizens. Senators Andy Kim and Cory Booker of New Jersey have called for a US-led investigation into Amer's death, but the Trump administration has remained largely noncommittal.
Last month, the State Department spokesperson, Tammy Bruce, said at a press briefing the Israeli military believed it was stopping an act of terrorism. 'We need to learn more about the nature of what happened on the ground,' she added. American officials did not respond to a request for further information.
More than 900 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, mostly by the Israeli military and some by settlers, since the Hamas-led offensive against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, according to the United Nations. Roughly 30 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians in the West Bank during that period.
From 2018 to 2022, less than one-third of complaints that soldiers had harmed Palestinians in the West Bank resulted in an investigation, according to a recent report by Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization. Only a fraction have led to legal action.
A Hail of Gunfire
The three young boys had gone out to pick green almonds, a seasonal delicacy, in a terraced orchard between Turmus Aya and Route 60, a busy north-south artery linking a patchwork of Palestinian towns and Jewish settlements, one of the friends, Ayoub Jabara, 14, told the Times at his home in Turmus Aya.
He denied that they had thrown stones, saying that they had merely been throwing dried almonds at each other. Ayoub, who is also a Palestinian American, described reaching a point very close to the main road, and finding a tree with dried-up nuts. 'Amer picked one up and was joking that it was like a stone and threw it at me. I threw it back,' he said.
Advertisement
Amer was shot at least 11 times, according to his father, Mohammed Rabee. Photographs taken on the cellphone of a family friend who accompanied Rabee when they picked up Amer's body appeared to show several entry wounds, including one in the center of his forehead and others in his neck and upper torso.
Hours after the shooting, the Israeli military issued a 10-second clip of blurry footage without a time stamp that shows three unidentifiable figures appearing to gather things from the ground. One of the figures appears to fling something in a downward motion, though no object is visible. The video cuts out as all three appear to turn and run.
The military said that its footage was filmed from a military post and that the soldiers were lying in ambush in what they described as a counterterrorism operation in the area.
Four days after Amer died, reporters for the Times searched the ridge where he was killed for any signs of the shooting and came across the clothes.
Garments that appeared to have been cut off by soldiers and blue surgical gloves were scattered around a bloodstained rock. The military said it was standard procedure to remove clothes to ensure the body was not booby-trapped. The clothes were later identified by the family as Amer's, when the reporters returned them to the family at their home.
Even if the boys did throw stones, Mohammed Rabee said, the soldiers could have fired warning shots to scare them away, or could have chased and detained them. 'He was 14 years old,' he said. 'It takes no special training to catch a little kid.'
Advertisement
Instead, the soldiers fired a barrage of bullets at him. His family believes they wanted to kill him. The military declined to confirm or deny that it has a shoot-to-kill policy for stone throwers.
Ayoub, Amer's friend, suffered 'multiple gunshot wounds,' according to medical records from the Istishari Arab hospital in nearby Ramallah, where he spent three days in the intensive care unit. Both Dr. Mohammad Qneibi, a physician at a local clinic where Ayoub was first taken, and Ayoub's father, Ahed Jabara, told the Times that the boy was shot at least three times in the groin area.
The family of the third boy, Abdulrahman Shihada, 15, declined to be interviewed.