The Young Men of This Palestinian Town Keep Dying

The town of Azzun is a hardscrabble place, militant, steeped in suffering. To its misfortune it’s located on Highway 55, the main thoroughfare between Nablus and Qalqilyah in the northern West Bank where there is heavy settler traffic. Two large settlements – Karnei Shomron and Alfei Menashe – are located to the east and west, with Azzun trapped between them. Among the despondent residents of the town, with its smattering of garages and metalworking shops, the temptation to throw stones at the settlers’ cars is very great.

The locals are doomed to be besieged, imprisoned behind mounds of dirt and a yellow-iron gate at the town’s entrance, which is chained shut for days and sometimes for weeks on end, seemingly arbitrarily. Even when the gate is wide open, it’s almost always manned by Israel Defense Forces soldiers. Residents who leave Azzun or others seeking to enter it, live in fear of the foreign force guarding the entrance day and night. Three young people were killed in the town over the past year, all of them in the same way. None of them was armed, they apparently didn’t endanger anyone. If they’d been Jewish demonstrators or Jerusalem soccer fans, the kind of people who are known to throw firecrackers, no one would have thought of shooting them with live ammunition, with the intent to kill. If a police officer or soldier were to rashly kill a Jew who was throwing stones or firecrackers, he would probably stand trial. But in Azzun soldiers who do just that to Palestinians are “doing their duty,” perhaps they are even considered paragons of heroism.

So, with intolerable offhandedness, without generating any interest in the media or elsewhere, young people who have virtually done no wrong are felled. The lifespan of people who have barely begun to live are cut short. At home the bereaved families drown in grief and agony, while the soldiers carry on as though nothing happened.

We visited Azzun less than a year ago to document the circumstances surrounding the killing of Yahya Adwan, who was 27 at the time of his death (“The suspected offense: throwing a firebomb. The punishment: death”; May 13, 2022). Adwan was initially arrested for throwing stones when he was 14, and was sentenced to two and a half years in prison, after which he had to leave school. He spent many of his remaining years in and out of Israeli jails, a total of eight years of his life, for throwing stones, until soldiers killed him.

It was Friday night, April 29, 2022 – during the previous Ramadan, when the army staged another of its showcase arrest operations, mostly pointless kidnappings that inevitably provoke violent resistance by local young folk – when an armored IDF jeep stopped on Azzun’s main street. Its door opened and a soldier inside fired three rounds at Adwan. Video footage showed the act of killing. In a twinkling the door slammed shut and the jeep proceeded on its way, while the young man bled to death.

At the time, Abdulkarim Sadi, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, noted that based on his data, that had been the fifth instance in recent weeks in which soldiers had opened fire with live ammunition from an armored jeep, before driving off. Adwan’s bullet wounds showed that he was shot while fleeing. A few minutes earlier a Molotov cocktail thrown at the jeep exploded and fizzled out on the armored vehicle, causing no damage. It’s not clear whether it was Adwan who threw it.

He was shot to death on the town’s main street, not far from his home, next to a supermarket that bears the idyllic name Paradise, a veritable Eden. This past March 2, 17-year-old Mohammed Salim was killed next to the local school, also by Israeli soldiers. It was Ramadan again, and the army was sowing death again.

The town’s latest shahid (martyr) was shot to death like his predecessors. He too was killed on the main street, also not far from home, though with one difference: Instead of next to a supermarket or a school, he was shot next to a public drinking fountain. All the rest is amazingly similar in the life and death of the young people who fall in Azzun.

The recorded chanting of verses from the Koran could be heard in the background, this week, when we visited the home of Ayid Salim, who was shot on April 8. He was 20. The bereaved father, Azam Salim, is a 55-year-old truck driver; his wife, Kifah, 50, is dressed in black. They have five daughters, and now only one son. Ayid dropped out of school in 10th grade and worked in a tire-repair shop near his house, to help support the family. Two years ago he did a three-month course in home decoration and design, at a college in nearby Qalqilyah. He was unable find a job in his new field, and continued to work in the tire place. His older brother Ali, 27, has a job in earthworks but is unable to save up enough money for any future, married life right now because of his family’s economic situation. The walls of the Salims’ living room are bare, parts of them not even plastered; a few plastic chair are stacked in a corner, practically the only furniture there.

Ayid Salim’s life generally moved between work and home; he left at 8 A.M. and returned at 5 P.M. He usually ate supper with his family and would later visit one of his married sisters, or go to meet friends hanging out idly on the main street. Like most of the young people in Azzun, Ayid also took part in clashes with soldiers near the gate at the entrance to town.

He was arrested last December for the first time in his life. Soldiers raided his home at night – another daring incursion behind the lines – and kidnapped Ayid from his bed. He was released 15 days later unconditionally, as the authorities’ suspicions of his involvement in stone throwing came to naught.

On Saturday, April 8, he worked as usual and returned home in the late afternoon. He waited for the meal that breaks the Ramadan fast, which he ate with his family, and then went out. Kifah tells us that she also went out, and when she returned her daughter Isra told her that Ayid had taken his boom box and said he was going to see friends. Minutes later Kifah heard a volley of gunfire coming from the main street, a few dozen meters from the house. She estimates that she heard about 30 shots.

Kifah panicked and rushed out of the house and into the street. A relative called to ask if she knew where her son was, and then informed her that Ayid had been wounded in the leg; he said he had been taken to the small local hospital and was in good condition. Dr. Mustafa Salim, the physician on duty, wrote in his report that Ayid was brought into the ER at about 9 P.M. in a private vehicle, after being shot five times in the upper body. He suffered serious wounds in the chest, shoulder and stomach and reached the hospital in a state of clinical death – all efforts to revive him were futile.

A short time earlier, Ayid’s cousin had been driving along Azzun’s main street. Abdel Rahman Salim, 30, was returning from work in an auto parts store in the neighboring village of Jayus. Suddenly he saw a young man lying on the ground, bleeding. He stopped and bundled the critically wounded victim into his car. Only then did he realize that it was his cousin. He saw a gaping hole in Ayid’s chest and later recalled that the young man did not respond and seemed to no longer be breathing.

Abdel Rahman told us this week that he noticed a soldier standing in the middle of the street about 150 meters from Ayid – perhaps he was the person who shot him. He also related that before the shooting there had been no confrontations there and that the soldiers had apparently moved out from behind the barrier at the entrance to Azzun to ambush young people who had thrown firecrackers at them, and had been pursuing them. When Ayid was shot, his cousin says, there were only a few young people around him.

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit this week stated, in response to a query from Haaretz: “On April 8, 2023, during activity to protect roads, IDF fighters shot a suspect who threw a device at them adjacent to the village of Azzun in the territory of the Ephraim Regional Brigade. A hit was observed. Afterward the death of Ayid Salim was reported. The circumstances of his death are being clarified.”

For his part, Sadi, the field researcher, said that some 20,000 people attended Ayid’s funeral on a particularly hot day in the middle of Ramadan.

Later on we went over to Ifrah Efendi’s oil-change and car accessories shop, near a drinking fountain for passersby. It was there that Ayid collapsed and died.