Khaled Bani Odeh, 11, and his younger brother Mustafa, eight, are the only survivors of an incident in which Israeli soldiers opened fire on the car carrying their family as they returned to their hometown of Tammun in the occupied West Bank after a night out shopping ahead of the end of Ramadan. The soldiers shot and killed all the other passengers: their parents, Ali (37) and Waad (35), and their younger brothers — five‑year‑old Mohammed and six‑year‑old Othman, who had special needs and was nearly blind.
The two older brothers recounted their story just after returning from the hospital, half-sedated, with minor injuries, and still trying to process the dramatic turn their lives have taken. EL PAÍS spoke with them at their home.
“When they stopped shooting, I opened the door and started screaming, ‘Please, someone help me! Everyone in the car is dead, and my brother Mustafa has fainted!’” Khaled recalls.
The soldiers, he adds, dragged him out of the vehicle by his hair before beating and mocking him. When he asked to go urinate, they opened the car doors wide and forced him through so he could see the bodies of his parents and siblings again.
Until then, it had been a happy night. Even though Ramadan was about to end, it was only their first iftar — the meal that breaks the fast during the holy Muslim month — with the whole family. Ali, the father, worked illegally in construction inside Israel, spending long stretches away from home because secretly crossing the separation barrier meant risking his life, explains his father and the children’s grandfather, Khaled Bani Odeh, who has just suddenly lost a son, a daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren.
They had gone to Nablus, the largest city in the area, to follow a tradition: buying new clothes for Eid al-Fitr, the festival that marks the end of Ramadan. “We went to a [clothing] shop, but it was closed. My father told us that we would buy clothes for Eid the next day, so we bought some crispy fried dough pastries,” Khaled recounts.
Everything changed in an instant, just as they were about to arrive home in Tammun. According to the two surviving children and a nearby witness (who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals), the family car had just turned onto a central street when, a few meters away, it encountered Israeli special forces agents conducting a raid. Without warning, the soldiers opened fire with automatic weapons.
“Suddenly they started shooting at us. I hid under the seat and tried to pull my brother Mohammed out. I was able to, but he was already dead,” says Mustafa, who was wounded by shrapnel.
At the scene, traces of dried blood and broken glass can be seen on the asphalt. The bullet-riddled vehicle is no longer there. A video circulating on social media shows an Israeli military vehicle, followed by an army jeep, towing it away, its windshield shattered by numerous bullet impacts.
The Israeli army admitted in a statement on Sunday that “four Palestinians were killed” when its forces opened fire on a car in Tammun. Their version of events is that the vehicle accelerated toward the soldiers, who, “perceiving a threat,” began firing. It’s difficult to imagine such a car accelerating in this way, because the curve is very close and cars rarely travel at more than 30 or 35 kilometers per hour.
The surviving children insist nothing unusual happened before the burst of gunfire. Three people were seated in the front (the mother and one child in the passenger seat) and three children in the back. “Mom wanted to get something from her purse and handed the child to Dad for a second. He slowed down and pulled over. We were about to stop the car when the shooting started,” Khaled recalls. Amid the chaos, the last thing he heard from his mother were screams, and from his father, the profession of faith, a common practice among Muslims when facing death.
Khaled survived, but he says he has no words (“it’s indescribable,” he says) to explain the feeling of having his brother’s body at his feet. When the shooting stopped, he opened the door and asked for help.
What happened next, he says, was a series of humiliations. “After killing my family, they laughed at me. The soldiers dragged me out, threw me to the ground, and jumped on my back. Then they put me in one of their jeeps and searched me, but they didn’t find anything. One of them said to me, ‘Tell me, without lying, who is with you in the car.’ I replied that there was no one except my family and me. He called me a liar and started hitting me on the head and leg,” says Khaled.
Then, Khaled continues, they took him out of the military vehicle and ordered him to turn around without looking back. Before taking Mustafa out of the car, a soldier grabbed his head and said, “If we find out there’s someone else with you, I swear I’ll rip your soul out with my own hands.”
Khaled was the one who had to walk to the ambulance to explain the situation. The soldiers — as usual — wouldn’t let it near. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Israeli forces “let the wounded die” by preventing the Palestinian Red Crescent from reaching those who had survived the initial gunfire.
One of the children who died, Othman, suffered from severe paralysis and could only perceive light and blurry shapes, his grandfather Khaled explains. He was especially close to another of the boys, Mohammed, whom he often helped with schoolwork. Khaled had encouraged him to join his parents and siblings on the trip to Nablus, telling him: “You see me all the time; you hardly ever see your father.”
He asked his son Ali to be careful because of the violent soldiers and settlers in the area. “He replied, ‘Don’t worry, Dad. How could anything happen to me? We’re traveling as a family, and the car has all its paperwork in order.’”
Hours later, Khaled heard that a car had been shot at. Tammun has 20,000 inhabitants, so he didn’t think it was his son’s car, “since they were traveling as a family and there were no tinted windows that could raise suspicion.” He asked a paramedic in an ambulance parked near his house what had happened. The paramedic replied that he didn’t know for sure because Israeli soldiers were preventing them from reaching the scene.
A relative later called him from the hospital to tell him that he was with his two grandchildren. Khaled asked: “And the others?” The relative replied: “I don’t know.”
The Israeli army has said that it is investigating the circumstances. Such internal investigations typically occur only when a case becomes public or has been documented. But these are opaque military inquiries rather than civilian ones, where impunity is the norm. According to the Israeli human rights NGO Yesh Din, between 2016 and 2024, only 0.9% of complaints filed by Palestinians resulted in charges.
The Bani Odeh family is among the thousands of Palestinians killed in the West Bank by Israelis, mostly soldiers, since October 2023, according to data from the Israeli NGO B’Tselem. At least 27 of these deaths have been at the hands of settlers. The NGO puts the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire this year at 16, a figure that does not include the victims of Sunday’s shooting or five of the nine people killed in settler attacks since the start of the war against Iran two weeks ago.
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