Hebron Infant Killing — A seven-month-old Palestinian baby was killed by an Israeli soldier in the occupied West Bank on Friday evening, after a single bullet tore through his family’s car as they returned home from a day trip, striking the infant in the head and wounding his mother in the face.
The child, Sam Fahd Abu Haikal, was travelling with his father Fahd, his mother, and his grandmother Firyal through the Tel Rumeida neighbourhood of Hebron when soldiers opened fire on their vehicle. The family had spent the day in Bethlehem and were approaching their home, situated just beyond an Israeli military checkpoint, when the shooting occurred.
Fahd described the sequence of events in stark detail. The soldier who fired was standing approximately 10 metres away, he said. The bullet penetrated the front windshield, passed through his arm, struck Sam in the head, and then hit his wife in the face. Sam’s mother remains hospitalised and is continuing to receive treatment for her injuries. A local resident reported hearing two shots fired, with roughly four soldiers present at the scene.
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The Israel Defense Forces offered a different account of the moments before the shooting. The military stated that a single shot was discharged after soldiers perceived the vehicle accelerating towards them and assessed it as a threat. The IDF subsequently acknowledged that the family were uninvolved civilians and expressed deep sorrow over the incident, adding that the matter is under review.
Fahd dismissed the military’s expression of regret. His son’s funeral took place the day after Sam suffered the fatal wound. The infant’s body, wrapped in a Palestinian flag, was carried through a funeral procession attended by mourners from the community.
Tel Rumeida is one of the most contested and heavily militarised pockets of Hebron, a city already fractured by decades of conflict. Israeli settlers live among Palestinian residents in the area, and a significant Israeli military presence has been maintained there to provide protection for those settler communities. The proximity of the family’s home to an Israeli checkpoint placed them in one of the most sensitive corridors in the city.
The killing of Sam Abu Haikal adds to a grim toll of civilian casualties in the West Bank since the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which approximately 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were abducted into Gaza. Israel launched a large-scale military operation in the Gaza Strip in response, a campaign that has now claimed more than 70,600 lives according to figures from the Hamas-run health ministry.
Hebron Infant Killing: Regional Implications
In the West Bank, Palestinian health ministry figures show that more than 1,000 Palestinians — among them both militants and civilians — have been killed since that date. At least 44 Israelis, including civilians and soldiers, have died during Palestinian attacks or Israeli military operations in the same period.
The circumstances of Sam’s death — a family in a car, obeying orders to stop, caught in a moment of lethal military misjudgement — reflect a pattern of incidents that human rights organisations have repeatedly flagged in the occupied territories. The IDF’s acknowledgement that the family posed no threat has done little to temper the grief and anger of those who knew the child.
As the military’s internal review proceeds, Sam Abu Haikal, who had lived for just seven months, was buried in Hebron.
