{"id":1015643,"date":"2026-08-21T20:48:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T20:48:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1015643\/"},"modified":"2026-08-21T20:48:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T20:48:20","slug":"palestinian-victims-of-israeli-settler-attacks-face-battle-for-justice-gun-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1015643\/","title":{"rendered":"Palestinian victims of Israeli settler attacks face battle for justice | Gun Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Occupied East Jerusalem<\/strong> \u2014 Sixteen years after Ziad\u2019s death, Moira Jilani still waits to hear the footsteps of her husband sound up the stairs of their home in Shu\u2019fat, occupied East Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

She still lives at her mother-in-law\u2019s building, where she and their three girls used to wait excitedly for Ziad to return home from work.<\/p>\n

Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list<\/p>\n

The first thing Moira remembers about Ziad is his laughter. Not the video that Israeli rights investigators pieced together of his final moments, nor the word \u201cterrorist\u201d that Israeli police attached to him hours after he died.<\/p>\n

An old Christian friend of Ziad had recently dreamed of him and called to check in on her. Ziad would bring Moira along to the b\u2019nei mitzvahs and weddings of Israelis he knew.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe didn\u2019t have \u2026 hatred for anybody. He was just that kind of personality that drew you in,\u201d Moira told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

On the day he was killed, Ziad had promised his daughters he\u2019d take them to the beach once Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque were finished.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust get ready, you and the girls. When I come back, I\u2019ll just honk, and you come on down,\u201d were his last words to his wife. \u201cInstead of going to the beach, we went to his funeral,\u201d Moira told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

On June 11, 2010, Ziad Jilani was driving his pick-up truck home through the congested roads of Wadi al-Joz on his way home.<\/p>\n

According to witnesses who spoke to The Los Angeles Times, Ziad was caught in the middle of a fight between Israeli forces and Palestinian youths throwing stones. A rock struck his windshield, causing him to swerve into a group of police officers, lightly injuring two of them.<\/p>\n

A border police officer then opened fire, and as he left his vehicle for safety, he was shot in the back. Minutes later, as he lay on the ground, he was shot two more times in the head at close range by a border police officer.<\/p>\n

An investigation by Israeli rights lawyers claimed that less than two weeks earlier, the officer who shot Ziad dead, Maxim Vinogradov, had posted online about his desire to kill Arabs, according to Moira. A case against Vinogradov and his commanding officer was closed due to a lack of evidence. Neither of them has faced trial.<\/p>\n

Ever since that promised day at the beach, Moira said she and her daughters have had to live with the fallout of Ziad being branded a \u201cterrorist\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember telling my daughters, \u2018 Please, do not look up your dad online,’\u201d she said, regarding the false information spread about Ziad online.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Israel] had everybody brainwashed to think that Palestinians were terrorists. But the Palestinians that are being threatened and killed are the ones being terrorised. So for me, I call the ones holding the guns the terrorists.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018He loved everybody\u2019<\/p>\n

August 21 marks the United Nations\u2019 International Day of Remembrance and Tribute to Victims of Terrorism. Today, Palestinians, like Moira, continue to face the consequences of false accusations against their loved ones or are the direct casualties of Israeli attacks.<\/p>\n

Hussein Abu Khdeir still remembers his son Mohammed singing and dancing as he ran down the street from school to his home. In the days before he was killed, Mohammed helped line the streets of Shu\u2019fat, a neighbourhood north of Jerusalem, with Ramadan lanterns, and joined the older boys in dancing the dabke.<\/p>\n

Mohammed was a boy who \u201cloved everybody\u201d, his father said. He worked without complaint in the family\u2019s electronics shop, serving Jewish and Arab customers alike with \u201cno discrimination.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was 16, but when you looked at him, he looked 12. His body was small,\u201d Hussein said.<\/p>\n

\"AA picture of Mohammed Abu Khdeir in the living room of his home, in Shu\u2019fat neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem. Mohammed was kidnapped outside his home and murdered by Israeli Jewish citizens on July 2, 2014 [Lucien Lung\/Al Jazeera]<\/p>\n

That mattered, Hussein believes, because on the night of July 1, 2014, three Israeli men circled the neighbourhood between Shu\u2019fat and Beit Hanina looking for a child to abduct.<\/p>\n

At 4am, Mohammed was waiting at the front door of their home when a vehicle approached. Hussein was forced into the car and driven to a forest in West Jerusalem, where he was beaten and burned alive.<\/p>\n

It is believed that the ringleader, Yosef Haim Ben-David, and two teenage relatives had decided to murder Mohammad in revenge for the killing of three Israeli teenagers days earlier. Ben-David is serving a life sentence; the two minors received a life term and 21 years. All three have had their convictions upheld on appeal.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey admitted they killed him out of a terrorist motive,\u201d he said. \u201cSo today, when people talk about victims of terrorism \u2013 is Mohammed not a victim of terrorism?\u201d<\/p>\n

More than a decade on, the political current in Israel has shifted even further in the killers\u2019 favour, Hussein said.<\/p>\n

Last October, 55 Israeli lawmakers, including 11 cabinet ministers \u2013 such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir \u2013 reportedly signed a letter calling for the pardon of Jewish Israelis convicted of killing Palestinians.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no justice under Israeli authority. None. If a Palestinian had burned an Israeli, they\u2019d have demolished his house and thrown his whole family in prison,\u201d Hussein said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese people did that to my son, and they are asking the government to let them go free.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018The easiest way to shield the perpetrators from accountability\u2019<\/p>\n

The killings of Ziad Jilani and Mohammed Abu Khdeir fit in a longer list of killings that both families, unprompted, recite from memory.<\/p>\n

There was Ahmed Erekat, who was shot dead<\/a> at a checkpoint in 2020 on his sister\u2019s wedding day. Initially, he was wrongly accused of a car-ramming attack.<\/p>\n

Iyad Hallaq was a young autistic man shot dead by police in Jerusalem\u2019s Old City that same year, as his caregiver screamed that he was unarmed and disabled. The officer who killed him was acquitted<\/a> of negligent homicide in 2023.<\/p>\n

Awdah Hathaleen<\/a>, a father and community organiser in Umm Al Khair, was filmed as he was shot dead by settler Yinon Levi in July 2025. Levi\u2019s belated indictment this August was the first<\/a> against an Israeli settler for the killing of a Palestinian since 2019, according to Yesh Din, a rights group that documents violations against Palestinians.<\/p>\n

And Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera correspondent who, while wearing a press vest, was killed by Israeli forces as she covered<\/a> an Israeli raid in Jenin in 2022. Four years later, no soldier has been charged with her killing, despite investigations by the UN<\/a> and multiple news organisations concluding she was likely deliberately targeted.<\/p>\n

A study by Yesh Din found that only about 3 percent of Israeli settlers investigated for crimes against Palestinians in the West Bank, between 2005 and 2024, were ever convicted; 93.8 percent of investigations were closed with no indictment filed at all. Since October 2023 alone, Israeli forces have killed more than 1,100 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including 242 minors, according to B\u2019Tselem.<\/p>\n

During that time, arson attacks on Palestinian homes have become a frequent event<\/a>. Settlers often comment in chat groups about the burning mosques<\/a> and Palestinians homes<\/a> \u2013\u00a0events that once brought global outcry but have now become a common occurrence in the occupied West Bank.<\/p>\n

There was also Ali Dawabsheh, a Palestinian infant who was killed<\/a> alongside his parents, Saad and Riham, after an Israeli settler firebombed their home in the West Bank village of Duma in July 2015 late at night. Their eldest son, Ahmed, then four, survived but suffered severe burns.<\/p>\n

After attracting global headlines, the attacker, Amiram Ben-Uliel, was convicted of murder in 2020 and sentenced<\/a> to three life terms. He has since become the subject of a crowdfunding campaign to secure his release, which has raised more than a million shekels ($334,000) thanks to the support of sitting Israeli lawmakers, among others, according to Israeli media.<\/p>\n

But as settler attacks, arson and displacement intensify across the occupied West Bank, human rights groups say a lack of accountability is the defining feature of Israel\u2019s two-tiered system of justice.<\/p>\n

\u201cIsrael\u2019s military law enforcement system is not a genuine mechanism for uncovering the truth and ensuring accountability, but a whitewashing mechanism designed to create the appearance of an investigation,\u201d said Yair Dvir, the spokesperson for B\u2019Tselem.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn practice, these investigations shield those responsible \u2026 and allow Israel \u2013 which is neither willing nor able to investigate its own crimes \u2013 to continue implementing the same policies without interruption.\u201d<\/p>\n

The word \u201cterrorist\u201d is one mechanism of impunity, said Tahseen Elayyan, deputy director of the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq, which was labelled and targeted by Israel as a \u201cterrorist organisation\u201d in 2021<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is one of the ways through which Israeli occupying authorities deprive Palestinian victims of the protection accorded to them by international law,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you want to escape this protection, the easiest recipe is to say: these are terrorists. That is the easiest way to shield the perpetrators from accountability.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018We are the ones being terrorised\u2019<\/p>\n

Israeli police initially suggested Ziad Jilani\u00a0deliberately tried to run over the officers. Investigators later found the crowded street left him little room to manoeuvre amid the chaos of the clashes.<\/p>\n

Even in her husband\u2019s absence, the label \u201cterrorist\u201d still follows Moira. \u201cAs soon as I put on the hijab, you can feel it,\u201d she said. \u201cBut if I wear [a kippa], suddenly I\u2019m not a terrorist any more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hussein says something similar shapes what he wants strangers to take from Mohammed\u2019s name now, more than a decade after his son\u2019s gruesome murder.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want them to know that Mohammed was martyred because he was a Palestinian Arab child,\u201d he said. \u201cIf he had been Jewish, what happened to him would never have happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

For both families, the passage of time has not brought an end to the loss \u2013 only new ways of carrying that burden.<\/p>\n

Every year, on the anniversary of Mohammed\u2019s death, trailed by neighbours, Hussein and his wife carry his photograph from their front door to his grave. In the two weeks leading up to the anniversary of his death, he said, \u201cWe\u2019re burning up inside. We can\u2019t go anywhere. We can\u2019t do anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"SuhaSuha Abu Khdeir sits underneath pictures of Mohammed Abu Khdeir in the living room of her home, in Shu\u2019fat neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem. Mohammed was kidnapped outside his home and murdered by Israeli Jewish citizens on July 2, 2014 [Lucien Lung\/Al Jazeera]<\/p>\n

Moira has partly worked through her grief via Parents Circle, which brings together bereaved Palestinian and Israeli families who have lost loved ones due to political violence.<\/p>\n

Having to raise her kids alone, Moria tells her youngest daughter, who was six when Ziad was killed, stories of her father to keep his memory alive.<\/p>\n

Asked what she would say to Ziad now, 16 years later, Moira Joulani didn\u2019t hesitate.<\/p>\n

\u201cI still love him. I think I love him more now than I did back then, because you look back and you see everything that he did for you,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe opened my eyes to what\u2019s going on here, and he left it for me to see it. And boy, did I see it. I\u2019m still seeing it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Occupied East Jerusalem \u2014 Sixteen years after Ziad\u2019s death, Moira Jilani still waits to hear the footsteps of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1015644,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[3095,4222,118,99,13191,3097,50,259603,4851,19500],"class_list":["post-1015643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-features","tag-gun-violence","tag-human-rights","tag-israel","tag-israel-palestine-conflict","tag-middle-east","tag-news","tag-occupied-east-jerusalem","tag-palestine","tag-racism"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117135470231440620","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1015643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1015644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1015643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1015643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1015643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}