Palestinian victims of Israeli settler attacks face battle for justice

Occupied East Jerusalem — Sixteen years after Ziad’s death, Moira Jilani still waits to hear the footsteps of her husband sound up the stairs of their home in Shu’fat, occupied East Jerusalem.

She still lives at her mother-in-law’s building, where she and their three girls used to wait excitedly for Ziad to return home from work.

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The first thing Moira remembers about Ziad is his laughter. Not the video that Israeli rights investigators pieced together of his final moments, nor the word “terrorist” that Israeli police attached to him hours after he died.

An old Christian friend of Ziad had recently dreamed of him and called to check in on her. Ziad would bring Moira along to the b’nei mitzvahs and weddings of Israelis he knew.

“He didn’t have … hatred for anybody. He was just that kind of personality that drew you in,” Moira told Al Jazeera.

On the day he was killed, Ziad had promised his daughters he’d take them to the beach once Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque were finished.

“Just get ready, you and the girls. When I come back, I’ll just honk, and you come on down,” were his last words to his wife. “Instead of going to the beach, we went to his funeral,” Moira told Al Jazeera.

On June 11, 2010, Ziad Jilani was driving his pick-up truck home through the congested roads of Wadi al-Joz on his way home.

According to witnesses who spoke to The Los Angeles Times, Ziad was caught in the middle of a fight between Israeli forces and Palestinian youths throwing stones. A rock struck his windshield, causing him to swerve into a group of police officers, lightly injuring two of them.

A border police officer then opened fire, and as he left his vehicle for safety, he was shot in the back. Minutes later, as he lay on the ground, he was shot two more times in the head at close range by a border police officer.

An investigation by Israeli rights lawyers claimed that less than two weeks earlier, the officer who shot Ziad dead, Maxim Vinogradov, had posted online about his desire to kill Arabs, according to Moira. A case against Vinogradov and his commanding officer was closed due to a lack of evidence. Neither of them has faced trial.

Ever since that promised day at the beach, Moira said she and her daughters have had to live with the fallout of Ziad being branded a “terrorist”.

“I remember telling my daughters, ‘ Please, do not look up your dad online,'” she said, regarding the false information spread about Ziad online.

“[Israel] had everybody brainwashed to think that Palestinians were terrorists. But the Palestinians that are being threatened and killed are the ones being terrorised. So for me, I call the ones holding the guns the terrorists.”

‘He loved everybody’

August 21 marks the United Nations’ International Day of Remembrance and Tribute to Victims of Terrorism. Today, Palestinians, like Moira, continue to face the consequences of false accusations against their loved ones or are the direct casualties of Israeli attacks.

Hussein Abu Khdeir still remembers his son Mohammed singing and dancing as he ran down the street from school to his home. In the days before he was killed, Mohammed helped line the streets of Shu’fat, a neighbourhood north of Jerusalem, with Ramadan lanterns, and joined the older boys in dancing the dabke.

Mohammed was a boy who “loved everybody”, his father said. He worked without complaint in the family’s electronics shop, serving Jewish and Arab customers alike with “no discrimination.”

“He was 16, but when you looked at him, he looked 12. His body was small,” Hussein said.

That mattered, Hussein believes, because on the night of July 1, 2014, three Israeli men circled the neighbourhood between Shu’fat and Beit Hanina looking for a child to abduct.

At 4am, Mohammed was waiting at the front door of their home when a vehicle approached. Hussein was forced into the car and driven to a forest in West Jerusalem, where he was beaten and burned alive.

It is believed that the ringleader, Yosef Haim Ben-David, and two teenage relatives had decided to murder Mohammad in revenge for the killing of three Israeli teenagers days earlier. Ben-David is serving a life sentence; the two minors received a life term and 21 years. All three have had their convictions upheld on appeal.

“They admitted they killed him out of a terrorist motive,” he said. “So today, when people talk about victims of terrorism – is Mohammed not a victim of terrorism?”

More than a decade on, the political current in Israel has shifted even further in the killers’ favour, Hussein said.

Last October, 55 Israeli lawmakers, including 11 cabinet ministers – such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir – reportedly signed a letter calling for the pardon of Jewish Israelis convicted of killing Palestinians.

“There is no justice under Israeli authority. None. If a Palestinian had burned an Israeli, they’d have demolished his house and thrown his whole family in prison,” Hussein said.

“These people did that to my son, and they are asking the government to let them go free.”

‘The easiest way to shield the perpetrators from accountability’

The killings of Ziad Jilani and Mohammed Abu Khdeir fit in a longer list of killings that both families, unprompted, recite from memory.

There was Ahmed Erekat, who was shot dead at a checkpoint in 2020 on his sister’s wedding day. Initially, he was wrongly accused of a car-ramming attack.

Iyad Hallaq was a young autistic man shot dead by police in Jerusalem’s Old City that same year, as his caregiver screamed that he was unarmed and disabled. The officer who killed him was acquitted of negligent homicide in 2023.

Awdah Hathaleen, a father and community organiser in Umm Al Khair, was filmed as he was shot dead by settler Yinon Levi in July 2025. Levi’s belated indictment this August was the first against an Israeli settler for the killing of a Palestinian since 2019, according to Yesh Din, a rights group that documents violations against Palestinians.

And Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera correspondent who, while wearing a press vest, was killed by Israeli forces as she covered an Israeli raid in Jenin in 2022. Four years later, no soldier has been charged with her killing, despite investigations by the UN and multiple news organisations concluding she was likely deliberately targeted.

A study by Yesh Din found that only about 3 percent of Israeli settlers investigated for crimes against Palestinians in the West Bank, between 2005 and 2024, were ever convicted; 93.8 percent of investigations were closed with no indictment filed at all. Since October 2023 alone, Israeli forces have killed more than 1,100 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including 242 minors, according to B’Tselem.

During that time, arson attacks on Palestinian homes have become a frequent event. Settlers often comment in chat groups about the burning mosques and Palestinians homes – events that once brought global outcry but have now become a common occurrence in the occupied West Bank.

There was also Ali Dawabsheh, a Palestinian infant who was killed alongside his parents, Saad and Riham, after an Israeli settler firebombed their home in the West Bank village of Duma in July 2015 late at night. Their eldest son, Ahmed, then four, survived but suffered severe burns.

After attracting global headlines, the attacker, Amiram Ben-Uliel, was convicted of murder in 2020 and sentenced to three life terms. He has since become the subject of a crowdfunding campaign to secure his release, which has raised more than a million shekels ($334,000) thanks to the support of sitting Israeli lawmakers, among others, according to Israeli media.

But as settler attacks, arson and displacement intensify across the occupied West Bank, human rights groups say a lack of accountability is the defining feature of Israel’s two-tiered system of justice.

“Israel’s military law enforcement system is not a genuine mechanism for uncovering the truth and ensuring accountability, but a whitewashing mechanism designed to create the appearance of an investigation,” said Yair Dvir, the spokesperson for B’Tselem.

“In practice, these investigations shield those responsible … and allow Israel – which is neither willing nor able to investigate its own crimes – to continue implementing the same policies without interruption.”

The word “terrorist” is one mechanism of impunity, said Tahseen Elayyan, deputy director of the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq, which was labelled and targeted by Israel as a “terrorist organisation” in 2021.

“It is one of the ways through which Israeli occupying authorities deprive Palestinian victims of the protection accorded to them by international law,” he said. “If you want to escape this protection, the easiest recipe is to say: these are terrorists. That is the easiest way to shield the perpetrators from accountability.”

‘We are the ones being terrorised’

Israeli police initially suggested Ziad Jilani deliberately tried to run over the officers. Investigators later found the crowded street left him little room to manoeuvre amid the chaos of the clashes.

Even in her husband’s absence, the label “terrorist” still follows Moira. “As soon as I put on the hijab, you can feel it,” she said. “But if I wear [a kippa], suddenly I’m not a terrorist any more.”

Hussein says something similar shapes what he wants strangers to take from Mohammed’s name now, more than a decade after his son’s gruesome murder.

“I want them to know that Mohammed was martyred because he was a Palestinian Arab child,” he said. “If he had been Jewish, what happened to him would never have happened.”

For both families, the passage of time has not brought an end to the loss – only new ways of carrying that burden.

Every year, on the anniversary of Mohammed’s death, trailed by neighbours, Hussein and his wife carry his photograph from their front door to his grave. In the two weeks leading up to the anniversary of his death, he said, “We’re burning up inside. We can’t go anywhere. We can’t do anything.”

Moira has partly worked through her grief via Parents Circle, which brings together bereaved Palestinian and Israeli families who have lost loved ones due to political violence.

Having to raise her kids alone, Moria tells her youngest daughter, who was six when Ziad was killed, stories of her father to keep his memory alive.

Asked what she would say to Ziad now, 16 years later, Moira Joulani didn’t hesitate.

“I still love him. I think I love him more now than I did back then, because you look back and you see everything that he did for you,” she said.

“He opened my eyes to what’s going on here, and he left it for me to see it. And boy, did I see it. I’m still seeing it.”

Reporting originally appeared via Al Jazeera. Read the full source for additional context.