The kidnapping and murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir occurred early on the morning of 2 July 2014. Khdeir, a 16-year-old Palestinian, was forced into a car by Israeli citizens on an occupied East Jerusalem street. His family immediately reported the fact to Israeli Police who located his charred body a few hours later at Givat Shaul in the Jerusalem Forest. Preliminary results from the autopsy suggested that he was beaten and burnt while still alive. The perpetrators subsequently claimed that the attack was a response to the abduction and murder of three Israeli teens on 12 June. The murders contributed to a breakout of hostilities in the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict.
On Sunday, 6 July, police took into custody six Jewish suspects for interrogation. One confessed quickly, incriminating three others, some of them minors, and they were put on remand for 8 days. Within a day, three had confessed and reenacted the murder at the scene of the crime. Three other suspects were released as unconnected with the crime, though they heard about it from the alleged murderers.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas blamed the murder on the Israeli government and demanded Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu condemn it "as we condemned the kidnapping of the three Israelis". The attack was widely condemned in Israel. Khdeir's family members have, however, blamed government incitement for the murder and rejected the PM's condolence message, as well as a visit by then President Shimon Peres. The day the suspects were arrested, the family of one of the Israeli victims, the Fraenkels, called the family of Abu Khdeir to condemn the murder and offer their condolences. The Fraenkels said they understand the magnitude of the loss and that they oppose any act of violence either by Jews or Arabs. The murder was condemned by the families of the three murdered Israeli teens, who sent Khdeir's family their condolences.
In the aftermath of Khdeir's murder, one of his cousins, Tariq Khdeir, a 15-year-old Palestinian-American boy, was beaten by Israeli police officers in an assault caught on camera. Another one of his cousins, a 19-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir, was detained by the Israeli police during a 28 July 2014 protest. Though he was an American citizen, Israel failed to notify US authorities of the arrest and the US has accused Israel of singling out Khdeir family members for arrest.
When Israel included Khdeir in its Victims of Acts of Terror Memorial at Mount Herzl, the family obtained its immediate removal. They had not been consulted, dismissed the inclusion as a bid to improve Israel's image, rebuffed the idea of him being memorialized among fallen Israeli soldiers who "killed his relatives in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank", stated the trial of the suspects was being dragged out, and complained that several months earlier, the Jerusalem council had forced them to remove his image from outside their home after it had hung there for four months, by threatening them with a per diem $500 fine, on the grounds it contravened a local Israeli law.
On 30 November 2015, the two minors involved were found guilty of Khdeirs' murder, and were respectively sentenced to life and 21 years imprisonment on 4 February. On 3 May 2016, Ben David was sentenced to life in prison and an additional 20 years.
Background
The Shu'fat neighborhood, located in East Jerusalem, was home to Mohammed Abu Khdeir. The neighborhood is relatively well-off and calmer than some other areas and its residents do not often get into confrontations with the Israeli police. Muhammad Abu Khdeir was 16 years old. His father owned and ran an electric appliances store, and the boy was studying to become an electrician at the "Amal" vocational high school. The family are part of a large clan that is well known in Shu'afat. In his last days, he helped a family member decorate the main street in Shu'fat with lamps on the occasion of Ramadan.
On 9 June, the autopsy findings for the Beitunia killings were released confirming that the two Palestinian teenagers killed on 15 May 2014 in the incident were shot with live ammunition from the Israel Border Police.
On 12 June 2014, three Israeli teenagers, Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Frankel were hitchhiking home from school to a Jewish settlement in the West Bank and were kidnapped. They were killed almost immediately. In the interim, their fate became the focus of intense concern throughout Israeli society. They were buried late in the afternoon of 1 July.
On the day of the funeral, Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu commented: "Hamas is responsible, and Hamas will pay. May the memory of the three boys be blessed."
In the evening the day of the funeral, hundreds of right-wing Israelis rampaged in Jerusalem yelling "Death to Arabs", and endeavoured to assault passers-by, who had to be extricated by police. The marches counted with the presence of prominent right-wing figures such as former MK Michael Ben-Ari, and Jewish Agency officials. MK Ayelet Shaked, posted on Facebook a quotation of journalist Ori Elitzur: "Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads." Referring to "the enemy", Ben-Ari called on Israelis to "[m]ake Ramadan into a month of darkness for them!" The evening before the killing, a group of racist supporters of the Beitar football club, known as La Familia, held a violent demonstration, in which they chanted "death to Arabs" and harassed Palestinians nearby. A "rash of racist incitement on Israeli social media" broke out after the deaths were revealed. Rabbi Noam Perel, head of Bnei Akiva, the world's largest religious-Zionist youth organization, urged on his Facebook page that the IDF be transformed into an army of avengers, which "will not stop at 300 Philistine foreskins". He also wrote:
The travesty will be atoned for with the enemy's blood, not with our tears. A whole nation and thousands of years of history demands revenge. The government of Israel is convened for a meeting of vengeance that is not a mourning sitting.
On the same day, a Palestinian teenager was killed by Israeli forces in a Jenin refugee camp. The killing was widely celebrated by right-wing Israelis on social media as "revenge". A Facebook page "The People of Israel Demand Revenge" was set up by a 17-year-old, showing soldiers posing and touting their rifles, posting messages of "revenge". The page quickly gathered 35,000 "likes", but was taken down after the news of Khdeir's murder. One item submitted to the site had a photograph by two smiling Israeli girls with a sign saying, "Hating Arabs is not racism, it's values!" At the recommendation of Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, the Israeli police launched a probe into call for incitement on social media. In addition, the IDF announced that soldiers posting messages or photos that pledged to avenge the teens' murder or used racist language will be severely punished.
On that Tuesday night, a Palestinian family registered a complaint with police concerning an attempt to kidnap their child, 10-year-old Moussa Zalum, on Shu'fat's main street. At the time, they reported, he was walking with his mother and brother when a car stopped and an attempt was made to try and pull him into the vehicle, grabbing him by the throat. The child managed to wriggle free, as the mother beat off the kidnapper and the car sped off. Early on Wednesday morning, 16-year-old Abu Khdeir was murdered. The mother later said two men were involved, and spoke Hebrew. The family alerted the police immediately, the mother said, and a patrol car passed and officers were given details and a description. In police accounts, the parents were to go to the police station and lay a formal complaint, something the family did not do, and therefore the police did not investigate. The police also alleged that the father told them the assailants were not Jewish, though the mother asserted the opposite in her own account. The police said that it was only after hearing of the Abu Khdeir kidnapping the following morning that police connected the two incidents.
Disappearance and murder
On 2 July, the night of the abduction, witnesses say that around 3:45 am, while Abu Khdeir was waiting for friends near his home, he was taken and thrown into a car by two or three men.
As local youths of the mosque were leaving to get food for the predawn meal, two young men came up to Muhammad when he was very close to the mosque, spoke to him, and then pulled him into the vehicle. The mosque's Imam, a family relative called Mahmoud Abu Khdeir, described it as a grey Hyundai, driven by a third man. Cries for help were heard by people nearby, and according to Abu Khdeir's father, he yelled, "Dad, dad, save me." The father later showed images from local surveillance cameras, downloaded to his cellphone, of two men walking down the pavement where the kidnapping occurred. The vehicle then drove off quickly toward the French Hill Junction and from there to the Jerusalem Forest. Several bystanders saw the kidnapping, and chased the car before notifying Abu Khdeir's father. The family immediately notified the Israeli police, at 4:05 am, and the police, accused by the family of neglecting their complaints, tracked Abu Khdeir's cell phone, which was later retrieved from the home of one of the arrested suspects, and discovered his scorched body within an hour in the Jerusalem Forest. According to the Palestinian Attorney General, Dr. Muhammed Abed al-Ghani al-Aweiwi, an autopsy conducted at the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute in Tel Aviv revealed that the teen had soot in his lungs, indicating that he was alive and breathing when he was set alight. He had been forced to swallow petrol beforehand. The burns affected 90% of his body, and it appeared he had sustained head injuries from a beating and had been repeatedly hit in the head with a sharp object, which at the time was alleged to have been a tire iron, but is now alleged to have been a wrench (see #Investigation of the crime). The Israeli Police suspected that the same vehicle was used in both Abu Khdeir's and Zalum's cases.
According to the confession of the leading suspect, Yosef Haim Ben-David, 29, owner of an eyewear shop in Jerusalem, and resident of the settlement of Geva Binyamin, the original intention was to beat up an Arab or torch a shop. They switched into civilian clothes and removed their kippahs in order, as the leader confessed, not to shame God's name. They almost cancelled the project when, after stopping to dine, the Arab proprietor reminded them as they left not to forget their change. On sighting Mohammed Abu Khdeir, they asked for directions to Tel Aviv, and he either gave a rough indication, in poor Hebrew, or said he did not understand. As he began to dial his cellphone, perhaps suspicious, the minors clamped hands over his mouth and dragged him into the car where, after he yelled "Allahu Akhbar", he was choked, and the ringleader gave the instruction for him to be finished off. On arriving in the forest, he was beaten repeatedly with a crowbar, each blow accompanied by a recital of Jewish victims of terrorism: "This is for the Fogel family, and this is for Shalhevet Pass". They then poured gasoline over him, set him alight, and got rid of the evidence. The indictment against Ben-David and the two minors also included an attempt to kidnap the 7-year-old Beit Hanoun boy, Moussa Zaloum, whom they choked and whose mother they punched in the face, and the torching of an Arab store earlier in June in the Palestinian village of Hizma.
Follow-up incidents reported
On Thursday evening, Palestinians of Shu'fat told local media that four settlers from Pisgat Zeev had attempted to kidnap a 7-year-old local child, Muhammad Ali al-Kiswani, and had fled on being thwarted. On Friday Palestinians of Osarin near Nablus in the West Bank complained that one of them, 22-year-old Tariq Ziad Zuhdi Adeli, had been sprayed with a gas by settlers, abducted in a car and then, taken outside the village, sustained injuries from a hatchet attack to his legs.
A 13-year-old Palestinian boy went missing in Wadi al-Joz, East Jerusalem on 4 July. A settler car had been seen in the area at the time.
Three days later, a video was aired showing Israeli undercover agents beating up Abu Khdeir's cousin, 15-year-old American citizen Tariq Khdeir, in a secluded area after the boy had been handcuffed and pinned to the ground. Tariq is a student at Universal Academy of Florida high school in Tampa. Israeli spokesmen said he resisted arrest and had a slingshot in his possession. His father, who was present, said his son was not involved in the protests. At a hearing before Congressional staffers on his return, Tariq stated that he was watching the demonstration from an alley, among a crowd, when Israeli police charged them, and, on noting the use of rubber bullets, he leapt over a fence to escape, but was caught by officers, handcuffed and then beaten unconscious.
Sunjeev Bery, an advocacy director for Amnesty International later stated, in reference to the incident, that
non-violent protest in Palestine is, in fact, illegal under military law 101. The law, in effect since 1967, states that gatherings of 10 or more people are forbidden unless expressly permitted by the IDF
The U.S. State Department stated that it was "profoundly troubled by reports that he was severely beaten while in police custody and strongly condemn any excessive use of force", and called for "a speedy, transparent and credible investigation and full accountability for any excessive use of force". Israeli Border Police started an official investigation on 5 July. Activists drew attention to the video and detention using the Twitter hashtag #FreeTarek. He was released Sunday morning on bail, kept under house arrest for 10 days, and forbidden residence in Shu'fat. He returned to Florida at the end of the 10-day period. Hours after he left, Israeli police ransacked his East Jerusalem home, destroyed furniture and emptied cabinets. In January 2015, Tariq was cleared of any wrongdoing that led to the attack.