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, prompting a wave of condemnation of what was described as state impunity for Israeli settler violence.
A video captured on Monday 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 residents of the village of Umm al-Khair at the time of the killing.
He was arrested by Israeli police for questioning, but was later released on house arrest while an investigation continued.
Alaa Hathaleen, Awdah’s brother-in-law, who was present at the time of the killing, speaking at a tent set up for mourners on Tuesday, said: “[Levi] immediately started firing randomly at everyone. We told him, ‘There are a lot of people here, there are kids – don’t shoot!’ But he shot anyway. Awdah wasn’t even involved.”
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. Israeli settlements are considered illegal under international law.
According to activists from Umm al-Khair in the south Hebron Hills, the killing happened after a settler in a bulldozer drove through their land, destroying trees and property.
The village sits right below the Israeli settlement of Carmel, founded in 1980.
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, the eyewitnesses said. Awdah Hathaleen, who was standing a distance away from the confrontation, was then struck by a bullet.
Alaa said: “Yesterday morning, we were laughing and joking. I didn’t know it’d be the last time I’d see him. I carried him here. His blood was everywhere.”
About a dozen Israeli soldiers raided the mourning tent, pushing those attending out while keeping a thumb on the pin of a stun grenade. Soldiers declared the area a closed military zone and said only residents of the village could be present. They arrested two activists and threw stun grenades at journalists who were too slow to leave.
“Coming to the place that he was killed, where they killed him, and kicking people out? This is not a life, this is against any law in the world,” said Alaa as soldiers pushed him out of the tent.
Despite the area being a closed military zone, residents later sent a video of a settler operating a bulldozer in the village.
The killing of Awdah Hathaleen prompted a wave of sympathy and condemnation, with the French foreign ministry calling settler violence “a matter of terrorism”.
“France condemns this murder in the strongest terms and all the deliberate violence perpetrated by extremist settlers against the Palestinian population that are proliferating throughout the West Bank,” the foreign ministry said, calling on the Israeli government to hold Hathaleen’s killer accountable.
Hathaleen was a father of three and 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.
“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.
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.
A police representative said during Levi’s remand hearing that Levi and a minor were attacked by stone throwers and that it appeared as if “their lives were in danger”.
Michael Sfard, one of Israel’s leading human rights lawyers, said settlers enjoyed “near complete impunity” in Israel.
“Justice that in the past has made appearances at the rate of miracles disappeared completely. So settler violence is state violence, and it serves Israeli political and ideological interests,” Sfard said.
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.”
