A seven-month-old baby doesn't have a political stance. He doesn't pose a tactical threat, he doesn't drive aggressively, and he certainly doesn't understand the concept of a military checkpoint. Yet, Sam Abu Haikal is dead.
The killing of a seven-month-old infant in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron exposes the systemic failure of military accountability. When a tragedy like this happens, the official response follows a predictable script: a statement of regret, a claim of perceived threat, and a quiet internal review. But behind the cold bureaucracy of military press releases is a grieving family whose lives shattered in a single second.
Understanding what happened to the Abu Haikal family requires looking past the sanitized headlines. It means examining how a routine family drive turned into a fatal shooting, and why true accountability remains virtually impossible under the current legal framework.
The Seconds That Shattered a Family
The shooting happened on a Friday evening. Fahd Abu Haikal, 41, was driving his 61-year-old mother, Ferial, back to her home in Tel Rumeida—a heavily fortified Hebron neighborhood characterized by a close, tense proximity between Palestinian residents and Israeli settlers. Also in the car were Fahd's wife, Dania Salameh, 28, their 11-year-old son, Kinan, and seven-month-old Sam, who sat in the backseat.
As the vehicle approached the neighborhood, a group of Israeli soldiers appeared out of the darkness. Fahd did exactly what any driver in the West Bank is trained by survival instinct to do. He stopped the car immediately. He raised his hands to the windshield to show he was unarmed and signaled that children were in the vehicle.
It didn't matter. A soldier positioned on the front-left side of the vehicle raised his weapon and opened fire.
A single bullet pierced the windshield. It tore through Fahd's hand, kept traveling, and struck seven-month-old Sam directly in the face, killing him instantly. The same bullet continued its path, tearing through Dania's jaw and embedding a fragment close to her heart. Doctors later made the terrifying decision to leave the shrapnel inside her body, determining that an operation so close to a major artery posed an immediate threat to her life.
Fahd describes a scene of immediate abandonment. Rather than offering medical aid or calling for an ambulance, the soldiers withdrew from the area. With blood pouring from his wife and his infant son, Fahd couldn't wait for emergency services to navigate the restrictive checkpoints of Hebron. He ran to the street, flagged down a passing civilian car, and rushed to the hospital. He waited an entire day to tell his wife that their baby was gone because her own medical condition was so critical.
Unpacking the Perceived Threat Defense
The Israel Defense Forces released a statement explaining that troops "perceived a vehicle accelerating toward them" and that a soldier responded with "single shots toward the vehicle." This "perceived threat" defense is the standard operational shield used to justify live fire in civilian areas.
However, silent security footage obtained and published by the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights, B'Tselem, directly challenges the military's version of events. The footage shows the family's vehicle complying with the order to stop. It wasn't accelerating; it was stationary.
This contradiction highlights a deeper issue within the West Bank's operational framework. When soldiers are conditioned to view every civilian interaction through the lens of potential counter-terrorism, the threshold for lethal force drops to zero. A driver tapping the gas, turning on headlights to see in the dark, or simply adjusting a vehicle's position can be interpreted as an act of aggression.
We saw this exact same dynamic play out in Nabi Saleh, near Ramallah, when two-year-old Mohammad al-Tamimi was shot in the head while sitting in a car with his father, Haitham. In that case, the military blamed a "mix-up" because another officer had fired into the air against regulations, leading a second soldier to assume the family's car was a getaway vehicle for gunmen. The military issued a symbolic reprimand to the officer who fired into the air, while the soldier who shot the child faced no criminal charges.
The Mirage of Military Accountability
Fahd Abu Haikal has stated his intention to file a legal case against the soldier who fired the fatal shot. But if history is any indication, the odds of obtaining justice are microscopic.
The military legal system operating in the occupied territories is fundamentally designed to protect its own. Data compiled by the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din reveals a stark reality: between 2017 and 2021, less than 1 percent of complaints filed against Israeli soldiers for offenses against Palestinians resulted in a prosecution. The vast majority of cases are closed without an indictment, often cited for "lack of evidence" or because the soldier's actions were deemed compliant with open-fire regulations at the time.
Consider what happened immediately after Sam was killed. According to Fahd, military personnel arrived at the scene and confiscated the local security camera footage. The family has not been contacted regarding an official investigation. When the entity responsible for the killing is also the sole entity responsible for gathering evidence and conducting the trial, the process cannot be viewed as impartial.
International bodies, including the United Nations, have repeatedly warned that the escalation of violence in the West Bank is fueled by this culture of total impunity. Since late 2023, more than 1,000 Palestinians, including at least 240 children, have been killed by Israeli forces and settler attacks in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Beyond the Statistics
When we read about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is easy to become numb to the numbers. But the destruction of a family cannot be quantified. Kinan, Sam's 11-year-old brother, had waited years for a sibling. Now, he is in a severe psychological crisis, forced to process the sight of his baby brother being killed right next to him.
Ferial, Sam's grandmother, still looks at her phone to watch the videos she took of Sam sitting in his stroller just hours before the shooting. He was a cheerful, quiet baby who rarely cried.
For Palestinians living in Hebron, this isn't an isolated tragedy; it is an omnipresent threat. The heavy presence of radicalized settlers protected by heavily armed teenage soldiers creates a volatile environment where everyday life is a gamble. Residents live with the constant, justified fear that they or their children could be shot at point-blank range for a perceived mistake.
If you want to understand the true cost of the occupation, look past the political debates in distant capitals. Look at the empty baby walker in a home in Hebron, and a mother carrying a bullet fragment next to her heart for the rest of her life.
To understand the broader context of how these open-fire policies are handled and the structural barriers to legal accountability in the region, the documentary analysis provided by human rights observers offers an in-depth look at the systemic issues involved. For a visual breakdown of the area's layout and testimonies, you can view this West Bank family testimony report, which details the immediate aftermath of the tragedy and the community's response.
