A Palestinian School Day Ended With Israeli Settlers’ Gunfire. A Boy Was Killed, Just as His Father Was 7 Years Ago
Zeteo speaks to witnesses after Israeli settlers kill a 14-year-old Palestinian boy and a 32-year-old man in an attack on a boys school in the occupied West Bank.
This article was published in collaboration with Egab.
AL MUGHAYYIR, the occupied West Bank – The morning at Al-Mughayyir Boys’ Secondary School had begun the way school mornings do. Two hundred students between the ages of 6 and 17 were in their classrooms, teachers at their boards, notebooks open. At around noon, the sound that ended it was not the bell.
The first shot came without warning. Within seconds, students were throwing themselves behind desks, pressing against walls, or freezing where they stood. Teachers moved fast, locking doors, pulling children away from windows, turning classrooms into holding rooms where the only lesson was staying still and quiet.
Principal Bassam Abu Assaf had dealt with settler incursions before. Groups arriving with clubs, threats, intimidation.
“This was the first time there was direct gunfire,” he tells me. “They intended to harm the students. The fire was direct and heavy.” His first instinct was not to call for help but to get word to parents. A voice message went out through messaging apps: Come now. Take your children.
Abu Assaf says he feared calling for help first would take too long, time that could put the students in even more danger. Unfortunately, he could not know what was waiting for students outside the school when they tried to reach their parents.
The school sits on the edge of Al-Mughayyir village, east of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, surrounded by open land, exposed on all sides. Three settlers, accompanied by three Israeli soldiers, according to witness accounts, had positioned themselves near the western wall – a two-meter (6.5-foot) concrete barrier topped by another two meters of mesh – and were firing toward the building and the courtyard. When parents began arriving, and students poured out to find them. That’s when the shooting intensified. The courtyard, meant to be the escape route, became the killing ground.