Execution at the checkpoint: A Palestinian poultry farmer left a wedding and drove to buy cardboard egg trays in a neighboring town. Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint pumped nearly 20 bullets into him point-blank, even as he lay wounded
A shot, then another shot, then a third. Through slits between concrete blocks, a man can be seen collapsing, spread-eagled on his back on the road. The firing continues, gunshot after gunshot.
Two Israeli soldiers stand beneath a red canvas roof at a checkpoint, aiming their rifles at their victim, who is lying there wounded. By now, he is certainly dead. In the blink of an eye, a father of 10 has been killed. His car is parked nearby. The entire video lasts 22 seconds, including the moment the camera is turned around for some reason.
This was the course of events last Friday (September 12) at twilight. The Al-Murabba’a checkpoint, southwest of Nablus, is one of the few such crossings that somehow have remained open for people entering and exiting Nablus after the main entrance to the city, the Hawara checkpoint, was shuttered after the war in Gaza broke out almost two years ago.
What happened during the moments when the poultry farmer, Ahmed Shahadeh, who had worked in Israel for decades and spoke fluent Hebrew, stepped out of his vehicle, apparently on orders from the soldiers, and was killed by a hail of nearly 20 bullets fired at point-blank range?
Maybe we’ll never know. The video – it’s not clear who uploaded it – that was published on social media reveals little and conceals much. It’s impossible to understand from it why the troops shot their victim, and in such rage.
It’s doubtful that Ahmed endangered them for a moment. But as he lay wounded on the road near the checkpoint, the soldiers apparently decided to execute him no matter what. What could possibly have happened to provoke such an incident?
An apartment in the village of Urif, not far from Nablus. It’s the family’s third day of mourning. On the ground floor, there is a small chicken coop, with its attendant unpleasant smell. The deceased had lived above it with his sick wife; in another apartment in the same building lived one of his sons with his family. Since October 7, 2023, two terror attacks have been perpetrated by residents of Urif.
Ahmed Shahadeh had worked in Israel for decades, as did some of his children before the war. Age 57, he had worked at a printing plant in Tel Aviv suburb Holon and spent 15 years at the Keter plastics factory in the Barkan industrial zone near the West Bank urban settlement of Ariel. His sons say he had Jewish friends.
A year ago, he retired. Or maybe he was fired. Then he set up a small business at home to keep busy and earn a bit of money. He sold the eggs from his approximately 200 chickens to stores in Urif.
Last Friday (September 12) afternoon, the Shahadehs attended the wedding of a relative at an events hall in the village. In the morning, Ahmed cleaned the coop, fed the hens, dressed up nicely, and drove with his wife to the event. Aelia, 55, suffers from muscular atrophy and needs help moving around, so Ahmed would take care of her.
His three sons are Jihad, 37, Abdelfatteh, 33, and Mohammed, 32, a construction worker in the West Bank settlement of Beit Arye who speaks Hebrew. On September 12, Ahmed stayed at the celebration for about an hour and then told his sons that he was going to the village of Tal, about a 15-minute drive away, to buy cardboard trays for the eggs he had gathered. He invited his sons to join him, but they preferred to stay behind. Their father told them that on his way back, he would pick up their mother. No one imagined that Ahmed would never return.
At about 5:40 P.M., about half an hour after he left, his sons saw a message in the local WhatsApp group about an incident at the Al-Murabba’a checkpoint, during which a Palestinian man was wounded. Attached to the message, the sons tell us, was a photo of a metallic-blue Ford Focus, their father’s car. The sons rushed out of the wedding and drove to the checkpoint.
About 100 meters (330 feet) before the barrier, the soldiers signaled them to halt and pointed their guns at them. “It’s my father, it’s my father!” Mohammed cried out to them. The troops ordered them to get out of their vehicle, pull up their shirts, and put their hands up. They only allowed Jihad to approach very slowly. This week, he said he saw part of his father’s still-uncovered body as it stuck out between concrete blocks.
“Is my father alive or dead?” he asked, agitated, as he approached the soldiers. One replied in broken Arabic: “Your father is dead.”
“Why did you kill my father?” he asked, and the soldier replied that Ahmed had thrown something at the soldiers. “You could have shot him in the leg if he really threw something,” Jihad said. There was no reply.
A few minutes later, according to Jihad, another soldier came up to him, shook his hand, and said: “I’m sorry.” Jihad asked to see his father’s body. The soldier said that he would see him when the Israeli authorities, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, COGAT, transferred him to the hospital.
The three sons returned home, grieving, to tell their mother the devastating news. About two hours later, at around 8 P.M., they received a phone call from COGAT and were told that the army had brought the body to the Hawara camp and that it was now on its way in a Palestinian ambulance to Rafidia Hospital in Nablus.
The whole family went there to see it; Jihad said he counted no less than 18 bullet holes in his father’s body, most of them in the neck, chest, and abdomen.
The body remained for a night at Rafidia, and the next day the sons buried their father. The one eyewitness told the family that he had only seen the soldiers ordering Ahmed to step out of the car, no more than that.
