Israeli forces kill a seven-month-old Palestinian baby, injure his civilian parents

The bullet passed through the father’s hand first. Then it kept going. It found the back seat. It found the mother. And it found the baby.

Sam Fahd Abu Haikal was seven months old. He had barely learned to sit up on his own. On Friday evening, he was riding in the family car with his mother, his father, his 11-year-old brother, and his grandmother. They were driving from Bethlehem to visit relatives in Hebron, a trip of maybe 20 miles through the occupied West Bank.

They never arrived.

Israeli soldiers opened fire on the family’s vehicle in the Tel Rumeida area, south of Hebron city. A bullet struck the father, Fahd Abu Haikal, a lecturer at Bethlehem University, in the hand. The same round tore into the back seat, where the mother held the baby. It struck Sam in the jaw.

The infant was evacuated in critical condition to a hospital. He died there. His parents were wounded. The 11-year-old brother and the grandmother, by some mercy, were not hit.

The Israeli military said troops fired at a vehicle they believed was moving toward them. An initial inquiry, the military said, found that those injured were uninvolved civilians.

That is the official version. A mistake. A misidentification. A family in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The father told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz what happened from the other side of the bullet. Soldiers signalled for the vehicle to stop, he said. Then they fired. A bullet passed through his hand and struck his son, who was being held by his mother in the back seat.

The official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that the infant sustained critical injuries after being struck in the jaw by the same bullet that wounded his mother. He later succumbed to his injuries.

This is not a new story. Not in Hebron. Not in the West Bank. Not in this long, grinding occupation that has now stretched across more than half a century. The Tel Rumeida area is a flashpoint, a Jewish settlement enclave inserted like a clenched fist into the heart of a Palestinian city. Soldiers are everywhere. Checkpoints multiply like weeds. And families drive past armed men who have the power to stop them, to question them, to shoot at them, and then to call it a mistake.

A seven-month-old baby does not pose a threat. A seven-month-old baby cannot ram a checkpoint. A seven-month-old baby cannot throw a stone or brandish a weapon or shout a slogan. A seven-month-old baby can only be held in his mother’s arms in the back seat of a car while his father drives through a city they have known their whole lives.

And still the bullet found him.

The military’s initial inquiry has been announced. There will be further investigations, almost certainly. There may be expressions of regret. There may even be prosecutions, though the history of such cases offers little reason for hope.

In the vast majority of incidents where Israeli forces kill Palestinian civilians, the soldiers involved are not punished. The military investigates itself. The findings are classified. The families are left with photographs and graves and questions that no official report will ever answer.

Sam Fahd Abu Haikal was seven months old. He was born in 2024, into a war that has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza and hundreds more in the West Bank. He never knew a day of peace. He never knew a day without occupation. He never knew a day when Israeli soldiers did not have the power to stop his father’s car and end his life.

Now his name joins a list that grows longer with each passing week. The list of the very young. The list of the innocent. The list of those killed not in the heat of battle but in the cold arithmetic of a military occupation that has learned to call every dead child a tragedy and every trigger pull a mistake.

His father is a lecturer at Bethlehem University. He teaches. He drives his family to visit relatives. He held his son as the bullet passed through his hand.

There is no outrage left that is proportionate to this. There are no words that can hold the weight of a seven-month-old boy killed by a bullet fired from an Israeli rifle. There is only the fact of it. The fact of the bullet. The fact of the jaw. The fact of the hospital. The fact of the grave.

And the fact that somewhere in Hebron, in the Tel Rumeida area, on a Friday evening, soldiers saw a car approaching and decided to shoot.