Sam Fahd Abu Haikal, a seven-month-old Palestinian baby, was buried this Saturday in the West Bank city of Hebron hours after Israeli soldiers killed him and injured his parents, by opening fire on the vehicle in which the family was returning from visiting relatives in Bethlehem.
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The baby was buried with a white shroud and a Palestinian flag. The account of relatives who witnessed the shooting and of the Ministry of Health of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) points to an incident similar to one three months ago in Tammun, another West Bank town (territory militarily occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War) in which troops conducting a raid killed the parents and two of their children by opening fire on the car they were driving.
According to Abu Haikal’s grandmother, Firyal, the family stopped their car after seeing Israeli soldiers in the Tel Rumeida area, south of Hebron. One of the soldiers, however, fired and a bullet went through the vehicle, killing the baby and injuring the parents. “Immediately after the presence of the occupation forces, an armed soldier opened fire on us. The bullets hit the car,” Fahd told Reuters.
The Israeli army has stated that its soldiers fired a single shot after “perceiving a vehicle accelerating towards them”.
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Fahd, the father of the dead baby, stated that the soldier who opened fire was 10 meters away and that the bullet went through the windshield, grazed his arm, and then hit his son in the head and his wife in the face. Both parents were injured.
Fahd, 41, stressed that an “apology” is not enough for him. “It’s not that the shots were fired by mistake and caused this tragedy […] To say it was a mistake, that ‘I didn’t know they were coming here’ or that the bullet went through the vehicle by accident, no. In this case, there is no such thing as a ‘mistake’,” he added. The family was traveling from Bethlehem (where the father works as a university professor) to visit relatives in Hebron when they encountered the soldiers, according to the official Palestinian news agency WAFA.