A seven-month-old Palestinian baby boy has been killed after Israeli troops reportedly fired on his parents’ vehicle in the occupied West Bank, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
Sam Fahd Abu Haikal died on Friday evening, with his parents also wounded, while they were driving in the Tel Rumeida area, south of Hebron City.
The official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that the infant sustained critical injuries after being struck in the jaw by the same bullet that wounded his mother. He later succumbed to his injuries. His father, Fahd Abdul Aziz Abu Haikal, a lecturer at Bethlehem University, was shot in the hand. The family was travelling from Bethlehem to visit relatives in Hebron when soldiers opened fire, the agency stated.
The incident occurs amidst scaled-up Israeli military operations in the West Bank following the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack, which resulted in approximately 1,200 deaths and 251 hostages, triggering the war in Gaza.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has since killed more than 72,900 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, a body generally considered reliable by United Nations agencies and independent experts.
Last month, the United Nations reported that over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since the conflict began, including at least 240 children. Forty-nine of these deaths have occurred since the start of this year.
The baby’s funeral is expected to take place later on Saturday.
The army said an initial inquiry found that the injured were uninvolved civilians and said the situation is under review.
Israel’s military said Friday that soldiers shot at a vehicle that was perceived to be accelerating toward them in the Hebron area. It said soldiers responded with single shots, wounding three Palestinians who were evacuated for medical treatment.
In March, Israeli soldiers fired on a car carrying a family in the northern West Bank, killing four people, including two children, the Palestinian Authority’s Health Ministry said at the time.
Israeli soldiers accused of harming Palestinians are rarely penalized and were indicted in fewer than 1% of cases based on 2,427 complaints alleging wrongdoing between 2016 and 2024, according to Israeli rights group Yesh Din.
More than 700,000 Israelis live in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, territories captured by Israel in 1967 from Jordan and sought by the Palestinians for a future state.
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