Residents accuse Israeli forces of executions during West Bank raid

NUR SHAMS, West Bank - When Israeli soldiers arrived at Mohamad Abu Sweilem’s door and summoned his son during a raid on this Palestinian refugee camp, he pleaded with the soldiers to take him instead.

He could not fathom why the Israelis wanted Rajai, a 39-year-old father of four who worked at the family hardware store and was not a militant, he said. The soldiers, who had been in the camp for days, did not seem to know who his son was, or care much: They never asked for identification, his family said. Still, they led him away.

Less than a minute later, Mohamed heard gunshots, and his son’s voice crying out in pain, he said. The family found Rajai’s body hours later, after the soldiers had withdrawn. They suspect soldiers used him as a human shield to confront militants in a downstairs apartment and then shot him, a claim the Israeli military denies.

Residents across Nur Shams accused the Israeli army of using brutal tactics during its raid on militants last month. For more than 50 hours, starting April 18, people were trapped in their homes as electricity, water and internet to the area were cut off. When they emerged, they found roads torn up, houses wrecked and bodies in alleyways.

The incursion was the latest in a series of Israeli raids in West Bank cities that have made the past few years the deadliest in decades for Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territory, with 2024 on pace to be even more lethal than 2023 was. Israel says the raids are part of a campaign to weaken militant groups, like the Tulkarm Brigade, that operate in Nur Shams: local groups that have gained strength in recent years as prospects for the end of Israel’s occupation have dimmed and that have found recruits among mostly young, politically disaffected men.

This article is based on more than a dozen interviews over two days inside Nur Shams and by phone, as well as on photos and videos provided by eyewitnesses and reviewed by Washington Post reporters.

This camp had already weathered two large-scale incursions since October, and many smaller raids, but this was the “most violent, brutal, longest” one yet, Rajai’s father said. As he spoke on the street outside his house, sirens sounded - a test of alarms meant to warn of the next raid. Zeinab, Rajai’s 6-year-old daughter, ran into the house, screaming in fear.

Fourteen Palestinians were killed during the raid on Nur Shams, including at least two children, residents said. Family members said at least three of the victims were summarily executed or used as human shields by Israeli soldiers. The dead included Rajai; Jihad Zandiq, a 14-year-old boy whose family said he was surrendering to troops when he was shot in the head; and Ahmed Arref, a wounded 20-year-old militant who hid in a family’s home and was found dead after soldiers expelled the family and took over the house.

Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said at an April 23 news conference that the office had “received reports that several Palestinians were unlawfully killed” and that soldiers “used unarmed Palestinians to shield their forces from attack and killed others in apparent extrajudicial executions.”

The Israel Defense Forces denied allegations of extrajudicial killings and using civilians as human shields. It said that Palestinian militants, not Israeli soldiers, had killed Rajai and that Jihad, the 14-year-old, had attacked Israeli forces. They said they were “not aware” of the incident involving the wounded militant.

Fourteen “terrorists” were killed by Israeli forces in close-quarters fighting and 10 Israeli soldiers were wounded, the IDF said, though it did not provide evidence that all those killed were militants. The operation appeared to target the head of the Tulkarm Brigade, Mohammed Jaber, better known as Abu Shujaa, who survived.

More than 450 West Bank Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military since Oct. 7, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Nearly 40 percent of the fatalities were recorded in camps such as Nur Shams, established decades ago for Palestinians who were forced from their homes or fled after Israel’s founding in 1948.

Nine Israelis, including five members of the security forces, have been killed in the West Bank over the same period, according to OCHA.

In the attack on Nur Shams, Israeli forces used ground troops, bulldozers and drones to inflict “unprecedented and apparently wanton destruction on the camp and its infrastructure,” according to the U.N. human rights office. As the militants fought the army, they fled over rooftops and fought from homes, residents said.

The Israelis “have been invading the camps regularly. They want to suppress any form of resistance,” Palestinian opposition politician Mustafa Barghouti said during a visit to Nur Shams a few days after the raid. Over the last six months, he said, Israeli forces “became totally liberal in doing anything, without any consideration of any right, or any restraint, or any regulation.”

It is “lawlessness,” he said. “Total lawlessness.”

‘I lost my life’

Rajai Abu Sweilem lived on the second floor of a large building owned by his family, across the patio from his father and mother. During the raid on Nur Shams, soldiers took over Rajai’s apartment, his relatives said - a pattern repeated throughout the camp, as soldiers occupied homes, residents said.

When the soldiers came for him, Rajai was staying in his parents’ apartment with his 8-year-old son, his father said. A group of militants was holed up downstairs in a ground-floor apartment that belonged to Rajai’s aunt. Roughly 30 seconds after Rajai was taken away, Mohamad, his father, heard the first gunshots and his son’s cries; then there was more gunfire, he said - “a lot, a lot,” and explosions.

The father and other relatives allege that soldiers took Rajai as a human shield to confront the militants, then shot him before the decisive gun battle.

The IDF called him a “suspect who claimed to have hidden armed terrorists in a storage room located in his home.” After he “directed” the soldiers to the room, “the suspect distanced himself to avoid harm, but the terrorists inside the storage room fired at the forces and hit him,” Israel’s military said.

“The forces did not instruct him to lead the way, and he was not standing in front of them,” the IDF said.

“Look, my son was in their custody,” Mohamad said. “From the minute they took him to the minute he died, they are responsible.”

The family said Rajai’s body was found in a debris-filled alleyway behind the house, near the corpses of three militants who had been in the downstairs apartment.

His body was brought to the emergency room April 21, according to the hospital report. Rajai had suffered a brain hemorrhage and skull fracture “caused by bullets,” as well as internal bleeding and shots to his chest and abdomen.

Mohamed, who has heart problems, said he and his wife had leaned heavily on their eldest child, including at the family store. “Anything I needed to do, he would do it for me,” he said. “I lost my life.”

‘Don’t shoot’

The family of Jihad Zandiq, 14, said they had arrived at Nur Shams around the same time that the Israelis did on April 18. Palestinian citizens of Israel, they live in Tayibe, south of Tulkarm, and were visiting Jihad’s grandfather’s house, as they did most every weekend. Jihad had arrived at the camp a day earlier, his father said.

On April 18, Jihad told his parents he was going to a nearby store but did not return until the next day, his father said. He left again April 19, the day he was killed, ignoring his parents’ pleas not to go out, and went to his great-uncle’s house. His family said he was not armed when he left.

Israeli soldiers near the great-uncle’s house called on fighters to come out and surrender, according to residents and Jihad’s family. When Jihad did try to surrender, he was shot in the head, said his aunt, Haneen Zandiq, who was in a nearby building and filmed the body, which she said lay in the street for 16 hours. A picture she had on her phone appeared to show Jihad with a large bullet wound in his right eye.

“I heard him,” she said. “He was telling them he wanted to surrender.”

Other people who lived in the area where Jihad was shot said they heard him surrendering.

“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” 33-year-old Nihaya, who spoke on the condition that she be identified only by her first name for fear of reprisal, quoted him as saying. But the soldiers were on “high alert” and were firing “randomly,” she said.

Mohammed Jaber, 30, Jihad’s distant cousin, said he “heard the army shouting ‘Hand yourselves over’” and instructing those surrendering to lift their shirts. He said he heard Jihad say “Don’t shoot, we are surrendering,” followed by the sound of “heavy gunfire.”

The killing of someone who has surrendered, even a combatant, is considered a war crime under the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court.

Jihad’s father, Niyaz Nasr Zandiq, said his son was a ninth-grader in Tayibe who played Xbox and hoped to become an electrical engineer. He did not belong to the Tulkarm Brigade, which is led by Jihad’s cousin, the father said.

But it seemed clear the boy wanted to be among the fighters, or at least to watch the battle. “Father, forgive me,” he said as he ran away from the house April 19. And he left behind a will, which his family discovered after he was killed.

Calling himself a “mujahid,” a term used for people who fight in the name of Islam, he wrote that he was “on the path of liberating Palestine from the filth of this occupier, who only knows the language of murder and destruction.”

“Most of the children of the camp write wills,” his father said. “They see death from the army every day.”

Jaber, the distant cousin, said Jihad “thought it was a game, and he could follow the young men from place to place,” referring to the militants. He also said Jihad did not carry a weapon.

While Jihad was gone, his father, Niyaz, was interrogated by Israeli officers and beaten, he recounted, showing bruises he said he received from being struck by a gun.

The IDF said Jihad was “a terrorist in the terror infrastructure of Nur Shams and during the activity, he threw grenades and fired at IDF forces. The IDF is not aware of live fire towards unarmed individuals.” The IDF did not respond to a question about whether soldiers had beaten his father.

Days after the raid, blood still pooled in the cramped alleyways of Nur Shams, near the flower pots residents use to brighten the cracked concrete. Some apartments were torn apart by gunfire, with bullet holes on every surface. In one apartment, on a wooden wardrobe, someone had written, in Hebrew, the word “revenge.”

The U.N. humanitarian affairs office said an initial assessment after the raid found that 11 households with a total of 55 people “were displaced when their homes were rendered uninhabitable by bulldozers or explosives.”

The operation “entailed massive bulldozing of several vital road sections inside the camp and those leading to Tulkarm city, causing severe damage to water, sewage, electricity, and telecommunication networks.”

One family was sheltering from the raid when a 20-year-old fighter, Ahmed Arref, entered the house from the roof, trailing blood. “Save me,” he said, according to Khawla Jaber, 63, who lived in the house.

“Cover me. Forgive me,” Jaber recalled him saying. She read him verses from the Quran as he sat in an armchair, bleeding “like a fountain” from bullet wounds in his legs that the family tried to treat.

Israeli soldiers arrived and asked the family if Arref had a weapon. The family said he did not. “You are responsible. If he has anything on him, you will be dead,” she quoted one of the soldiers, an Arabic speaker, as saying.

The family went upstairs to the roof. A video they recorded showed the scene they returned to, about 10 to 20 minutes later: Arref, dead on the floor of a bedroom, lying on a bloodied carpet with what the family said were several fresh bullet wounds, including two to the head. When reporters visited, the carpet had been removed. The tile beneath it was chipped by what the family said were the shots fired by the Israeli soldiers into the wounded man.

Arref’s father, Ghaleb Mahmoud Arref, 54, said he was away from the neighborhood when his son was shot. Ahmed, who had been wanted by the IDF for about two years, did not spend much time at home - just stopping by to eat from time to time.

They had quarreled over his decision to fight. “I told him to forget about this path you are taking,” he said. His wife was so worried about her son that she became ill.

Among those wounded in the raid was a nurse, Hamza Jitawi, 21, who said he was shot in the leg by an Israeli sniper as he responded to a call to help an injured man. Jitawi said he had been wearing the red and white vest of the Palestine Red Crescent Society.

The IDF declined to comment on the shooting.

The bullet went through his left shin and shattered his tibia. His recovery will take a year, he said, grimacing in pain. During previous raids, he said, Israeli soldiers would fire warning shots at paramedics if they wanted them to stay away from an area.

“This time,” he said, the shooting was “direct.”