Israeli Forces Fatally Shoot Palestinian Father, Mother and Two Children in West Bank
By Jack Khoury and Josh Breiner, Reposted from Haaretz, March 15, 2026
Ali Bani Odeh, 37, his wife and two of their children, 5 and 7, were killed in the West Bank’s Tammun when Israeli forces fired on their car. Two other children survived the attack. The Justice Ministry unit responsible for investigating police misconduct has opened a probe into the matter
A father, mother, and two of their children were killed overnight into Sunday by Israeli forces’ fire in the West Bank town of Tammun, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.
The Justice Ministry unit responsible for investigating police misconduct opened a probe into the incident on Sunday.
Khaled, the oldest child to survive the incident, said that the six family members were in their car as they were shot. Two of his brothers were killed on the spot, and his father and mother died shortly after.
Khaled shared that an Israeli soldier removed him from the vehicle after shooting. “He said, ‘We killed some dogs,’ removed me from the vehicle and beat me,” Khaled said. “After that, they took me to a Jeep and searched me. They asked me, ‘who was with you in the car?’ When I said, ‘my mother, father and brothers,’ he started yelling at me, calling me ‘liar, liar.'”
Local residents said an Israel Defense Forces special unit entered Tammun in a vehicle with Palestinian license plates, followed by reinforcements from nearby checkpoints. According to them, the family had been returning from Nablus after shopping for the upcoming Eid al-Fitr holiday at the end of Ramadan when an Israeli force stopped their car and opened fire.
The IDF and Israel Police said the car accelerated towards the Israeli forces, who felt endangered and open fire.
The family’s relative, Magdi Bani Odeh, told Haaretz: “The army’s version that the father accelerated is completely absurd. A father with a mother and four children – who would accelerate? Especially since it was a covert unit in a Palestinian-plated car. This is cold-blooded murder.” The IDF and Border Police did not deny the report that the car from which the Israeli forces fired had Palestinian license plates.
Read the rest here. Additionally:
Israel Deports Jewish American Activist Who Reported West Bank Settler Hitting Palestinian Girl With Car
By Ran Shimoni, Reposted from Haaretz, March 15, 2026
Israel deported a Jewish American left-wing activist on Sunday who reported that a vehicle had struck a five-year-old Palestinian girl in the West Bank, according to officials and her attorney.
She was not flown directly to the United States due to ongoing restrictions on flights from Ben-Gurion International Airport amid the Iran war, and was instead transferred to Egypt via the Taba border crossing in Sinai.
The activist was detained after a confrontation with the Jewish driver involved in the Friday incident in the South Hebron Hills, Israel Police said. She is suspected of disturbing public order and damaging the driver’s vehicle.
The case of the injured Palestinian child is being investigated as a traffic accident. According to authorities, video footage from the scene appears to support that assessment.
According to the activist’s testimony, during both her police interrogation and a subsequent hearing facilitated by the Population and Immigration Authority ahead of her deportation, she was not asked about the collision or the circumstances of her arrest. Instead, she says, questioning focused on posts from her private Instagram account and on her political views.
In contrast to standard practice, in which the state generally covers the cost of a deportee’s flight to their country of origin, Israeli authorities were not responsible for the woman after she crossed into Egypt. Left without a direct route home, her family turned to the U.S. Embassy in Egypt for assistance, which they said had agreed to fund a temporary hotel stay in the resort town of Taba, just across the border from Eilat.
Officials from Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority and the police said the activist had previously been warned in February, when she was questioned over her activist activity in Masafer Yatta – a cluster of Palestinian communities in the South Hebron Hills that has long faced demolition orders and eviction threats. That prior warning, they argued, justified her immediate deportation.
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As a Palestinian Father Struggled to Save One Son, a Uniformed Settler Shot His Other Son, Too
By Gideon Levy and
The bloodstains are still fresh, glistening pools on a dirt trail, not yet dried out by the sun. The father fixes his gaze on the reddish spots, as if taking a mental picture of his son’s blood in order to perpetuate his memory. He shifts uneasily, this way and that, clearly distraught.
Two days have passed since one of his sons was shot to death here, before his eyes, and another was seriously wounded. This is the first time the farmer has returned to the killing field. A sea of barley plants sway in the wind; some of them are trampled, evidence of the violent struggle that played out here last Saturday afternoon.
These are the fields of the village of Wadi al-Rahim in the beleaguered Masafer Yatta area of the South Hebron Hills, a tiny village of 200 souls.
Mohammed Shnaran is a 57-year-old farmer who has six children, including his deceased son. A bandage on his forehead above his left eye and stitches in his head are testimony to what happened. He’s the father of Amir Shnaran, 29, married with two daughters, who was killed here two days before our visit, and also of another married son, Khaled, 34, who was seriously wounded.
This week Khaled was still hospitalized, unconscious, in intensive care at Al-Ahli Hospital in Hebron. His physicians said that the bullet fired by a uniformed settler struck his spine and warned that he might be permanently paralyzed in both legs.
(The Israeli settler) then called the police and summoned reinforcements – two brothers known for their violence, one of them wearing an army uniform. Their all-terrain vehicle was also a gift from Strock – in other words, it’s a civilian vehicle.
An eyewitness, Khares Shnaran, an 18-year-old relative, related this week that one of the two violent settlers attacked Khares’ own brother, Zakariya, 23, striking him in the face with a rifle butt. The settler in uniform fired a bullet into the air, according to other people who were there. In the meantime, his brother clubbed Mohammed, knocking him to the ground. Amir rushed to help his father, whereupon the settler in uniform fired two shots at the young man from a distance of a few meters; they hit his neck and chest, killing him instantly. Mohammed leaped up and frantically shook Amir, but to no avail. He wasn’t breathing and had no pulse. Blood streamed from his nose, mouth and ears.
Even as Mohammed was fruitlessly trying to revive his son, another shot was heard and he saw his other son, Khaled, collapse, after being shot in the right side of his chest – again from a distance of a few meters, again by the uniformed settler.
The mendacious video clip disseminated by the settlers is captioned: “Brutal lynch of a Jewish shepherd in Sussia on Shabbat – a soldier who was nearby shot one of the rioters to death.” That’s how perpetrators who make themselves out to be the victims – those who carried out the “lynching” with their own hands – described what happened when they invaded Palestinian property, letting their livestock feed on and destroy crops.
The IDF Spokesperson provided this response: “On Saturday, IDF troops, police from the Shai [Samaria and Judea] District and Border Police rushed to an area close to the village of Sussia in the wake of a report about violent friction between Israeli civilians and a number of Palestinians, as a result of which a number of those involved were wounded.
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Once Upon a Time, Israeli Prison Guards Abused Palestinians in Sde Teiman – or Did They?
From here on, military prison guards are allowed to rip the anus of every prisoner, as long as he is Palestinian, to break his ribs, puncture his lungs. Not only will no harm come to them, they will become heroes
By Gideon Levy, Reposted from Haaretz, March 15, 2026
Once upon a time there was a military base in southern Israel called Sde Teiman, where during the Gaza war four pens were built in which hundreds of Gazans were held without trial, some of them innocent. Once upon a time there were reports of the death of 36 detainees who, according to various accounts, died of torture, starvation or the lack of medical attention. Once upon a time there were also testimonies about detainees who underwent limb amputations due to necrosis caused by permanent shackling in plastic restraints. Once upon a time there were also accounts of sexual abuse and even rape by military reservists who guarded the inmates.
And once upon a time there was the “Sde Teiman affair,” in the wake of which a wild mob led by cabinet ministers and lawmakers broke into the camp, in front of the cameras. Once upon a time here was a video that documented the abuse that led to the affair, which ended Thursday with a fart, the fart of Military Advocate General Maj. Gen. Itai Ofir, a settler. Only the video remains, forgotten, vilified, cast to the margins of history as irrefutable but entirely irrelevant evidence of what really transpired at Sde Teiman on July 5, 2024. I watched it again this weekend. It was as hard to watch as it was before, infuriating, disgraceful, terrifying.
It depicts goings-on in a torture camp. It shows sadism on the part of men in uniform, prison guards who in the Israeli grotesque are called “combatants,” without irony. The video presents compelling evidence of the horrific abuse of a helpless man, writhing in pain at the feet of the stormtroopers. One holds a baton while the others hold up riot shields to cover up their crimes.
Remaining, too, are the right-wing mouthpieces who celebrate their victory, the victory of lies over truth, evil over humanity. From here on, only the lies will remain: the lies of the guards in the black hoods, who aren’t ashamed to claim they were defending themselves against the danger posed by a starving, tortured man, handcuffed behind his back, as they dragged him along the floor like a sack, his eyes covered; the lies of their lawyers and admirers, who turned the perpetrators into victims, night into day, the torture affair into the video-leak affair.
They deflected the conversation from the only question that matters – did it happen or did it not it – to the marginal, totally, irrelevant issues: the former military advocate general, the leak of the video to journalist Guy Peleg, Israel’s Channel 12 News which aired it and the procedure in which the new military advocate general rushed to do exactly what was expected of him in order to placate the people who appointed him, in order to put an end to this affair.
But the affair is not over. Instead of the lost issues of justice and equality before the law, of good and evil, of crime and punishment, we have a clear statement by state institutions whereby from here on, military prison guards are allowed to rip the anus of every prisoner, as long as he is Palestinian, to break his ribs, puncture his lungs. Not only will no harm come to them, they will become heroes. If the heroes of our childhood were, to our shame, soldiers in the shady commando Unit 101, the heroes of the new zeitgeist are the criminal prison guards in Unit 100. That is the history of Israel in a nutshell.
Read the rest here.
Jack Khoury’s coverage for Haaretz focuses primarily on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with a strong emphasis on evolving and breaking news stories. Joshua Breiner is an Israeli journalist who serves as the criminal correspondent for Haaretz. Ran Shimoni focuses on national coverage in Israel, with a notable emphasis on government & politics, crime, and culture & society. Levy writes opinion pieces and a weekly column for the newspaper Haaretz that often focus on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
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