Israel's Kill Zone Has Shifted to the West Bank
The execution of a 14-year-old boy in a quiet West Bank town
On Monday evening in Sebastia, a quiet farming village of 4,000 in the occupied West Bank, an Israeli military sniper killed 14-year-old Ahmad Rasheed Sholi with a single shot to the chest from approximately 350 meters away, mere hours after the Gaza ceasefire took effect. He’d been walking with his friends near the kindergarten. Ahmad was a cousin of Nawar Sholi, a boy I wrote about in The Drift last month, who was shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier in January 2024.
Here is the Israeli military’s official comment on Monday’s shooting:
For reference, 350 meters is the length of nearly four football fields; John Elway, in his prime, could throw the ball approximately 75 yards downfield, or 69 meters.
My December story in The Drift about archaeological warfare in the West Bank focused on Sebastia. The village’s ruins have made it a target for violent settlers, soldiers, and politicians who claim Sebastia—which they refer to by the biblical name Samaria—as their own, on account of artifacts indicating it was the ancient capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel. Occupation forces have been raiding the town several times a week since October 7, 2023, but according to my local guide and translator, Zaid Azhari—whose every past report has been independently corroborated—the soldiers on Monday didn’t even enter Sebastia, let alone face off against stone-throwing kids; they simply drove to the edge of town, executed a child from hundreds of meters away, and left. Ahmad bled to death on Columns Street, named for its historic Roman colonnade that stands as a testament to the town’s living heritage.
Hearing this latest news, I thought about Mohammad Alsaafin’s story in The Nation about the “new rules of war” following the ceasefire in Gaza:
What Israel has done to Gaza may herald a new era of state violence with no rules and no crimes. Everything is permitted, and nothing will be prosecuted. No child is off-limits to the snipers. Missiles are programmed to home in on hospitals and doctors. Drones will bomb your home, then burn you alive in the tent you set up to protect your family from the cold. An army will arrive and declare where you live to be a kill zone. And if you are killed, why were you in the kill zone? You must have been a terrorist. Israel did all of these things to the people of Gaza while the leaders of the world looked on, and it did them with the full political and military support of the United States.
While this type of violence is certainly not new in the West Bank, Israel’s primary kill zone appears to have shifted since the ceasefire to the biblically rich region that right-wing Israelis regard as far more valuable than Gaza. On Monday, a wave of settler pogroms swept through Palestinian villages, “torching homes and businesses.” Within hours of Trump’s return to the White House, he had lifted one of the only measures Biden took to curb Israeli aggression—sanctions against violent settlers. (There have been reports that Trump promised support for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank in exchange for a $100 million campaign donation from Miriam Adelson. Adelson denies this.) Shortly before an Israeli sniper killed Ahmad, a settler Telegram group circulated a list of “terrorists” being “released tonight into the villages”—a reference to the release of imprisoned Palestinians as part of the ceasefire agreement. (Ahmad was not on the list.) After the shooting, settlers shared a photo of the young victim with the caption, “The terrorist Ahmed Rashid Hamad [sic] was eliminated by the IDF forces in the town of Sebastia, northwest of Nablus.” (Here is some background on the collaboration between Israeli soldiers and settlers in their attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.) On Tuesday, Netanyahu announced a “large scale and significant military operation” in Jenin—“Operation Iron Wall”—which killed at least nine and wounded dozens more (“We are acting systematically and resolutely against the Iranian axis wherever it extends its arms,” Netanyahu said. “In Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Judea and Samaria.”) That same day, two more videos surfaced showing unarmed Palestinians apparently being killed by Israeli snipers in the West Bank (I have not been able to independently verify either one). It all brings to mind a chilling conversation I had with two settlers near Sebastia, who justified the violence I had witnessed by insisting that the quiet, peaceful town was a “war zone.”
Zaid sees Monday’s killing as a calculated message: Regardless of developments in Gaza, the siege of Sebastia would only intensify.
As I wrote in The Drift, when I visited Sebastia’s mayor, Mohammad Azem, at his home in March, our meeting was interrupted by the sound of gunshots, followed by a phone call alerting him that Ayman Schaer, a 27-year-old construction worker, had been shot in the leg by a soldier. He’d been walking home from work near the ancient Roman forum, only feet from where belligerent soldiers had pointed guns at a small group I was part of the day before. (An Israeli military spokesperson insinuated to me that perhaps “nefarious” terrorists had been using me as a human shield.) Once the dust settled and the mayor had a chance to speak to me again, he told me that he feared his community would never fully recover from the execution of Fawzi Makhalfeh, the 18-year-old university accounting student who, eight months earlier, had been ambushed by Israeli soldiers and shot over 50 times while driving to his father’s factory. (The Israeli military has repeated, without evidence, that Fawzi was “neutralized” during an “attempted car ramming.”)
On Tuesday, after Ahmad’s funeral, the mayor told me Sebastia had entered into a “new state of terror. Children are no longer leaving their homes without their parents, and fear has gripped every house and every child in Sebastia.”
Later, Zaid called to tell me that Israeli soldiers had just left town after a violent raid that included gunfire and gas bombs, interrupting the period of mourning and family visitation. (Fortunately, nobody was injured). He reminded me of a question he’d asked me back in March: “Once Israel has wiped out Gaza, will your media pay attention to what’s happening here?”
He asked if I’d seen any headlines about the killing of Ahmad or the violent raids of Sebastia. I told him I had not.
“I know,” Zaid said. “And I knew when I first asked you, too.”
Postscript:
After The Drift published my story in December, a few readers responded that perhaps I was a useful idiot, subjected to a curated performance of suffering by the locals—a variant of the racist “Pallywood” conspiracy theory, which suggests Palestinians are staging the horrors they’re experiencing. One of these readers cited this passage:
To get a better sense of the quotidian violence residents of Sebastia face, I talked to Nemer Ghazal, who said he was shot in the thigh as a teenager during a protest, and Mofeed Shihab, who said his left leg was shot off while he was walking home from school in 2009. “I felt like I was set on fire,” he told me. I also met a seventeen-year-old named Nawar, who hasn’t been able to play soccer or concentrate in school since he was shot in the thigh while picking up lunch for his family. (I am withholding the last names of minors for their protection.) While we spoke, his friend Islam walked by and waved me off when I offered him a seat. “He can’t sit,” Azhari said. “They shot him in the ass in November.”
In this suspicious reader’s narrative, my encounter with one gunshot victim while interviewing another gunshot victim was no coincidence—it had been staged to exaggerate the ubiquity of brutality in Sebastia.
Such suspicion reflects a fundamental unwillingness to absorb the extent of the cruelty directed at Palestinians in the West Bank—cruelty that makes it not an unlikely coincidence, but, rather, a statistical probability that any given resident of Sebastia that one might run into has first or secondhand experience with violence at the hands of soldiers or settlers.
To this reader, I would like to ask: Do you believe that the murder of Nawar’s cousin is the next act of an elaborate performance?
Thank you for this. I cannot bring myself to "like" such grim news but I'm grateful for it and have reposted to FB, or what that's worth.
Well done Jasper. I am very proud of you and your determination to speak out for those who have no voice. It’s hard telling the truth in these uncertain times sometimes even dangerous but it is absolutely necessary.
Ah- Fia Ibnee 😊🙏