Baby killed in Hebron shooting as Israel opens investigation

A seven-month-old Palestinian baby was killed when an Israeli soldier opened fire on his parents’ car in Hebron’s Tel Rumeida neighborhood, turning a family trip home into a case now focused on accountability, evidence and military scrutiny. Sam Fahd Abu Haikal’s parents buried him the next day, carrying his small body to the grave wrapped in a Palestinian flag.

The shooting on June 5 also wounded both of his parents, Fahd Abu Haikal and Dania Abu Haikal, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Fahd Abu Haikal, a 41-year-old lecturer at Bethlehem University and a multimedia professor, said he was driving his 80-year-old mother home after a family visit when the shooting began. He said the vehicle had stopped when the soldier fired, striking Sam in the face, passing through the mother’s jaw and leaving shrapnel near her heart. Fahd Abu Haikal was shot in the hand.

The Israeli military said it expressed “deep sorrow” and opened an investigation, while initially saying the soldier believed the vehicle was accelerating toward troops. That account became central to the question of how such shootings are reviewed inside the army, and what kind of evidence can test a split-second claim about threat and intent. In Tel Rumeida, where Israeli forces are a constant presence, the distinction between a moving vehicle and a stopped one can determine whether a soldier’s decision is treated as lawful force or a fatal mistake.

On June 9, B’Tselem released video footage it said showed the opposite: the soldier fired as the car was slowing to a stop, with no danger to the troops. The organization said the vehicle was far from the soldiers and posed no threat. Its executive director, Yuli Novak, said the killing reflected a wider reality in which Palestinian lives are treated as disposable under Israeli rule. The footage intensified pressure on the military’s inquiry by putting a visual record against the army’s first explanation.

The killing landed amid a broader escalation in the West Bank since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent military operations, a period that has sharpened scrutiny of Israeli use of force in the occupied territory. Sam Abu Haikal’s funeral in Hebron on June 6 brought the dispute back to its human core: a child who had reached seven months of life, and a family left asking whether an internal investigation can ever deliver more than a formal review after the fact.