Shuafat refugee camp, East Jerusalem CNN —
The six days after Rami Al-Halhouli was shot dead by the Israeli police near his home in East Jerusalem were a nightmare for his loved ones.
Israeli authorities were holding the 12-year-old boy’s body at an undisclosed location, refusing to release it for burial unless the family agreed to hold only a small, private funeral for him for fear of the event sparking riots.
“They threatened us that if anything happened, if any clashes happened, they would take his body from us,” Cindy Al-Halhouli, Rami’s older sister, told CNN.
Rami’s father Ali Al-Halhouli told CNN he eventually agreed. He was too scared to ask what would happen if he refused, he said.
Rami was killed on March 12, the second night of Ramadan. He and other children from the Shuafat refugee camp in East Jerusalem were letting off fireworks – a Ramadan custom – at a parking lot next to Rami’s home when he was shot in the chest, the bullet fired from a distance.
He is one of at least 169 children – 164 boys and five girls – killed by Israeli forces and Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 last year, according to United Nations data.
It was an exceptionally deadly period for Palestinian children living in the area: More were killed in a single year than in the previous seven years combined. The vast majority were shot with live ammunition, most in the head or upper body, according to the UN.
The UN and multiple international human rights groups have alleged that Israeli security forces are operating in an atmosphere of impunity across the occupied territories. The groups say most deaths are never investigated, with no accountability or consequences for those responsible for them. The Israeli authorities usually declare such killings to be in response to unspecified threats, without giving any details about the victims.
More than eight months after his killing, Rami’s family is still searching for answers.
They told CNN they haven’t been told if or why he was targeted; they were not allowed to see his body or the autopsy report; and they were not informed of any investigation into the incident.
At the time of the shooting in March, an Israeli police spokesperson said police had responded to a “violent disturbance” at the refugee camp and that an officer fired “towards a suspect who endangered the forces while firing aerial fireworks in their direction.”
CNN has repeatedly asked the Israeli police for information on the case but has not received any answers.
Rami’s room in the family home remains untouched. A poster of a red Audi is pinned to the wall, Rami’s swimming goggles and a towel still hang on a mirror as if he had just put them there. The clothes he was wearing that day are laid out on the bed. The white T-shirt has a small, bloody hole in the middle.
The whole home, a modest apartment in a multistory building that can only be reached by the narrowest of streets, is decorated with photos of Rami. A sideboard has been turned into a small shrine with candles and an engraving of the family’s favorite picture of him, showing Rami sharply dressed, wearing a bowtie.
Ali Al-Halhouli said he went to the local police station several times to demand answers about what happened to his youngest child but was always given the runaround. The police first told him there was no file on Rami, he recalled, and then said that if he wanted to see any documents, he’d need special clearance.
“We only want to know how he died,” Al-Halhouli said. “But instead, they just investigated each one of my sons and nephews, asking them questions.”
A video filmed by another child in the parking lot indicates that the shot that killed Rami was fired from the direction of a police watchtower at a heavily militarized checkpoint controlling access to the camp. The reinforced concrete structure stands in an elevated position some 60 meters (66 yards) away from where Rami and his friends were playing, with several barriers between the two locations. The police have not confirmed where the fatal shot came from.
“We all heard a big explosion, and everyone jumped up because the children were screaming downstairs. We initially thought that one of the fireworks exploded in his hands,” Cindy told CNN.
“We don’t understand why they fired live ammunition. It seems that they saw a group of children and they targeted them,” she said.
The video shows Rami lighting the fuse of a firework before a loud bang is heard. As he falls to the ground, the firework in his hands goes off, lighting the sky above him. He appeared to have been aiming the firework in the general direction of the tower, but not directly at it.
“If the shooting was a result of the game that they were playing with the firework, then there was no danger whatsoever to anyone, and therefore there was no reason for the killing,” the family’s legal representative, Leah Tsemel, told CNN in an interview.
Tsemel is an Israeli lawyer who has devoted her career to defending Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, including some who have been convicted of violence against Israelis.
She has been trying to force the Israeli authorities to share any documents they have with the family, she said, and is determined to go to court if needed.
“If there was an interrogation of the police officer involved, I want to see all the documents from it. If there was no interrogation, I asked them to please immediately investigate this case and conduct an interrogation,” she said, adding that the police have so far failed to respond.
Tsemel said that instead of investigating Rami’s death, the Israeli authorities appeared to be using the incident as a threat. She said leaflets urging parents to “take care of their children” have been distributed around the camp. They warn that “negative events” happen to those who ignore police guidance.
No man’s land
The Shuafat refugee camp has long been considered something of a no man’s land, an overcrowded urban island where nobody is in charge and even basic resources are hard to come by.
The camp, established in 1965, sits inside Jerusalem’s municipal borders, which means its residents pay local taxes and the main responsibility for its administration lies with the Israeli authorities. The municipality told CNN it provides “a range” of services in the neighborhood, but locals and international humanitarian and human rights organizations said this range is at best limited. The roads are full of litter and potholes, with raw sewage and piles of uncollected garbage posing a health risk.
The whole neighborhood is densely packed, its narrow streets and alleyways lined with apartment buildings extended upward over time to make the most of limited space. The camp is cut off from the rest of annexed East Jerusalem by Israel’s separation wall.
Anyone wanting to leave it for other areas of Jerusalem is required to go through airport-style security that includes a walk-through metal detector, an X-ray machine for belongings, an ID check, as well as occasional pat-down and strip searches. The Israeli authorities have on occasions shut the checkpoint without notice and the rules on who can and cannot go through it keep changing, so people can be turned away for seemingly random reasons.
And while there is no restriction on movement to and from the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority is not allowed to run the Shuafat camp, because it is inside Jerusalem’s borders.
This leaves it up to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) to provide most services, including education, sanitation, health and social care.
But UNRWA is facing an existential threat after Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset, voted last month to ban the agency from acting within Israel.
“There’s a huge amount of anxiety in the camp because of the importance of our services – and the demand for our services has been rising because of the economic problems,” UNRWA’s senior communications manager, Jonathan Fowler, told CNN.
The camp is notoriously overcrowded, with no parks or green spaces, which may explain why Rami and his friends were playing in the run-down parking lot when he was shot.
He and other children would often hang out there, noting down the license plate numbers of cars that were coming and going. Undercover operations by Israeli security forces are common in the camp, so any unknown vehicle immediately sparks anxiety among the residents.
Yousef Mukheimar, a local community leader, told CNN the unique position of the camp means the residents have no protection against crime, with criminal gangs and drug dealers frequenting the neighborhood.
“The Israeli police does not care about what is going on in here and about protecting the public; they only conduct security actions that are related to them, and Palestinian security is not allowed to come here,” he said. Most residents would never seek help from the Israel Police, he added, because it is perceived as an enemy force responsible for violence and oppression.
Mukheimar told CNN incursions by Israeli security forces have become more common and increasingly violent in the past year. UNRWA said that among the 19 camps it operates in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Shuafat experienced the second highest number of confrontations between residents and Israeli forces in 2023.
During one incursion in September, Israeli forces shot and killed another child: 16-year-old Hani Al-Qirri.
His family told CNN he was an innocent bystander, a quiet boy who enjoyed baking and lived with his grandmother after being orphaned as a young child.
The Israel Police told CNN he was “a terrorist who shot fireworks at them” and was “neutralized.” Asked by CNN about any evidence that would back up that claim, the police spokesperson did not provide any.
Al-Qirri was buried immediately after his death. His grandmother told CNN she did not want to wait for any investigation, fearing that, as in Rami’s case, the Israelis would take his body away from the family.
Israeli authorities, as well as some Palestinian militant groups including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have long used bodies as bargaining chips. Both Islamic and Jewish laws require bodies to be buried as soon as possible after death, so any delay can be very distressing to the bereaved.
In 2017, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Israeli state had no authority to do so, in response to a legal petition filed by the human rights group Adalah.
But within a few months of the court’s ruling, the Knesset passed a new law that allows the police to withhold the bodies of Palestinians who were suspected of carrying out or attempting to carry out a terrorist act, until the bereaved families agree to any restrictions placed on the burial and funeral procession.
Rami’s family was finally reunited with his body at 1 a.m. on March 18. An Israeli ambulance brought him to a checkpoint far from the family’s home.
They were not allowed to bring Rami home or bury him in the family plot at the Lions’ Gate Cemetery just outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem.
Instead, he was buried in a neighborhood several miles from his home, where the family knew no one. The funeral, as demanded, was a muted affair.
And yet, even that was not enough for the Israeli authorities, who for days after the ceremony kept contacting Ali Al-Halhouli, repeatedly asking him to identify people in videos taken during the funeral.
“They (the Israeli authorities) were there, right among us, even inside the mosque, to see what’s going on,” he said.
