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Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist and journalist who helped make the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, has been killed during an attack by Israeli settlers in the south Hebron hills.
The attack on Monday was captured on video, which appears to show an Israeli settler, Yinon Levi, who was put under sanctions by the US president, Joe Biden, then removed from the sanctions list by Donald Trump, firing his gun wildly at the time of the killing.
He was arrested later by Israeli police for questioning, though no charges have been filed against him.
The killing comes amid an increasing wave of settler and Israeli military violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. At least 1,009 Palestinians have been killed and more than 7,000 injured in the West Bank since October 2023.
Accountability for settlers who commit acts of violence against Palestinians is rare.
According to activists from the village of Umm al-Khair in the West Bank, where the shooting took place, the killing happened after a settler in a bulldozer drove through their land, destroying trees and property.
When a resident approached to ask the driver of the bulldozer to stop, the driver knocked him down with the blade of the bulldozer. Residents began to throw stones, and Levi allegedly emerged from the settlement and began firing. Hathaleen, who was standing a distance away from the confrontation, was then struck by a bullet.
“My dear friend Awdah was slaughtered this evening,” Basel Adra, the Palestinian co-director of the No Other Land documentary, wrote. “He was standing in front of the community centre in his village when a settler fired a bullet that pierced his chest and took his life. This is how Israel erases us – one life at a time.”
Activists shared the last message Hathaleen sent before being killed, in which he urged people to act to stop settler encroachment on Umm al-Khair.
“The settlers are working behind our houses and … they tried to cut the main water pipe for the community … If you can reach people like the Congress, courts, whatever, please do everything,” Hathaleen wrote.
Yuval Abraham, the Israeli co-director of the film about the Israeli efforts to remove Palestinians from their homes in Masafer Yatta, shared video on social media of the settler shooting during the attack on the village.
The Palestinian Authority’s education ministry accused Israeli settlers in the West Bank of killing the activist, writing on social media that Hathaleen “was shot dead by settlers … during their attack on the village of Umm al-Khair” near Hebron, in the south of the occupied territory.
The Israeli military acknowledged the incident, and said an armed “Israeli civilian” opened fire on a group of people hurling rocks. The Israeli police said they arrested one Israeli citizen for questioning and that they were investigating the incident, while the military arrested seven people from Umm al-Khair, including two international solidarity activists.
“Following the incident, the death of a Palestinian was confirmed,” the police added.
Settlers said they would demonstrate outside the Jerusalem courthouse where Levi was taken for questioning, saying he was “standing at the forefront” for them.
Hathaleen was a resident of Masafer Yatta, a string of hamlets located on the hills south of Hebron, which have been declared a military zone by Israel. The efforts to prevent Israeli forces from destroying their homes was the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary.
Last month, Hathaleen and his cousin Eid al-Hathaleen, an artist and community leader, were denied entry to the US at San Francisco international airport, after their visas were revoked on arrival for a series of planned talks sponsored by faith groups.
The San Francisco supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who protested against the decision to revoke the visas of the two men and deport them, wrote in a statement on X on Monday: “Just a few weeks ago, Awdah attempted to come to San Francisco to build bridges between cultures – to share a message of peace. He had come to raise summer camp funds to help give Palestinian children experiencing the unthinkable a semblance of a childhood back home. Instead, he was denied entry at SFO.”
“This is an absolute tragedy, and must be condemned,” Mahmood added.
Trump removed the sanctions Biden imposed on Levi and more than a dozen other extremist settlers and organisations that terrorise Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on his first day in office in January.
Levi is under both EU and UK sanctions.
Hathaleen also documented the campaign of forced expulsions and demolitions for the Israeli-Palestinian magazine +972.
Last week, in a report headlined “In Umm al-Khair, the occupation is damning us to multigenerational trauma”, he wrote: “The demolition forces enter the village. All the children run to their mothers, who scramble to salvage whatever they can from their homes before it’s too late. Everyone watches on anxiously to see who will be made homeless today. The bulldozers gather in the centre of the village and then stop. Soldiers disembark. The villagers look each other in the eye, searching for words of comfort, but there are none. Our children ask us why this is happening, but we have no answers.”
AFP contributed to this report
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