Palestinian baby laid to rest after shooting in Hebron, West Bank

A seven-month-old boy was laid to rest in Hebron after his shrouded body, wrapped in a Palestinian flag, was carried by his father to the graveyard. Palestinian officials identified the infant as Sam Fahd Abu Haikal, who was shot dead the previous evening in Tel Rumeida, south of Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The family said the boy was traveling from Bethlehem to his grandmother’s home in Hebron when the shooting happened. The boy’s father, Fahd Abdul Aziz Abu Haikal, is a lecturer at Bethlehem University. His wife was in critical condition, he said, after a bullet struck the windshield, pierced his hand, and then hit the child and his wife in the back seat.

The boy’s grandmother, Ferial Abu Hikal, said the car had come to a complete stop when soldiers opened fire from about 10 meters away. The Israeli military said troops perceived a vehicle accelerating toward them and fired single shots. It said an initial inquiry found that those wounded were uninvolved civilians and that the incident remained under review. The army also expressed deep sorrow over the killing.

The funeral took place after prayers at a nearby mosque in Hebron, and the child was buried in the city on June 6, 2026, one day after the shooting. The scene underscored how quickly a vehicle stop in Tel Rumeida, a neighborhood where Israeli settlers live under heavy military protection among Palestinian residents, can turn into a fatal confrontation.

The killing lands in a West Bank already strained by expanding settlement activity and repeated violence. A March 2026 report from the United Nations Human Rights Office said more than 36,000 Palestinians had been forcibly displaced in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem over the previous 12 months, and it documented 1,732 incidents of settler violence that caused casualties or property damage. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said it had recorded 1,680 settler attacks across more than 270 West Bank communities so far in 2025, an average of five incidents a day.

That broader pattern helps explain why the death of an infant in Hebron is likely to reverberate far beyond one family. A 2024 European Union report cited in Reuters-linked coverage said more than 700,000 Israeli settlers live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank among more than 3 million Palestinians, a demographic reality that shapes daily friction, repeated military interventions and mounting scrutiny over civilian harm.