Jerusalem // At first, the father of Ishaq Badran, a 16-year-old Palestinian who was shot dead by Israeli police near Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate after stabbing an Israeli, was shocked by what his son had done.
“I was surprised. I did not expect it,” said Qassim Badran in the mourners’ circle at his home in the Kufr Aqab neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem. “My son always obeyed me. Every time I’d say ‘don’t go to any areas of trouble’ he would say ‘yes.’”
But as dates were passed around and weak coffee poured for visitors on Sunday, Mr Badran, who works in a factory in the Israeli town of Holon, added: “What did not surprise me is the anger. I know my son is a free and courageous individual.”
Israeli media described Ishaq simply as a “terrorist” after the attack on Saturday. But interviews with relatives and friends reveal a more detailed and complex picture of what motivated him, what made him so angry and what causes others to perpetrate a wave of stabbings that has shaken Israel and threatens to turn into an all-out Palestinian uprising.
In fresh violence on Monday, there were three stabbing attacks in Jerusalem by late afternoon. In the first, a 17-year-old Palestinian was shot and killed after trying to stab a policeman near the Old City, police said. A Palestinian witness, however, told Reuters he was unarmed and police had shot him four times after shouting at him. Hours later, a 16-year-old Palestinian girl stabbed and lightly wounded a policeman near the national police headquarters before being shot and wounded by him, police said. Shortly afterwards, a 13-year-old Israeli boy was stabbed and critically wounded and a 25-year-old Israeli man was wounded in stabbings carried out by two Palestinians in the Pisgat Zeev settlement in East Jerusalem, Israeli media reported. One of the assailants was shot and killed by security forces and the other was seriously wounded when he was hit by a car while trying to escape, the reports said.
Ishaq, an eleventh-grader at an Israeli vocational high school, was lauded as a “hero” and “martyr” by the mourners, who said he was acting to defend Islam’s third holiest site, Al Aqsa mosque, which is situated on an area also revered by Jews as the Temple Mount. Banners of Hamas, the hardline rulers of Gaza, and Fatah, the faction of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, were visible in the mourners’ tent. But Ishaq’s friends said he did not belong to either of those groups, or to any other.
Much of the violence that has flared in Jerusalem and the West Bank since October 1 is being triggered by a Palestinian perception that Israel is seeking to impose Jewish prayer at Al Aqsa, something Israel denies.
At least 24 Palestinians, some of them involved in attacks, and four Israelis have been killed, including seven shot by Israeli security forces during a demonstration along Gaza’s border at the weekend.
But for Ishaq there was an added factor, his father and friends said: upholding the honour of Muslim women against perceived Israeli infringement.
Mr Badran said that what upset his son the most was hearing that a settler had tried to strip the hijab off a Muslim woman, Shuruk Dwayyat, in the Old City last Wednesday. Palestinian and Arab media quoted witnesses as saying a settler tried to remove her hijab and then fired at her. Israeli police spokeswoman Luba Samri said Dwayyat was shot after she stabbed and lightly wounded a Jewish man. She added that the incident was under investigation. Discussion of the incident went viral on Palestinian social media in subsequent days. Ishaq “spoke to his mother about this and cried”, his father said. “He was crying, saying no one is defending these women.”
Ishaq’s close friends described him as an introverted, polite teen who liked football, weightlifting and swimming. The oldest of six children, he prayed regularly and encouraged his friends to come with him to pray, they said.
A 13-year-old friend said Ishaq was “extremely upset” when he saw him on Thursday and Friday. “We were looking at pictures of martyrs. He said that Fadi Aloun was killed in cold blood,” he said, referring to a Palestinian shot by Israeli police on October 3 for what Palestinians believe was no reason. Israeli police say he was killed after he stabbed an Israeli.
They also viewed mobile phone pictures of Mohanad Halabi, a 19-year-old who killed two Israelis in a separate stabbing attack on October 3. “Both of us were talking of what a heroic act Mohanad did. Ishaq mentioned what happened to the woman with the hijab and said that had we done this to a Jewish lady they would have killed us.”
Despite Ishaq’s anger “he didn’t tell me he would do anything”, the friend said.
The next day Ishaq waited near a bakery across from Damascus Gate and when an ultraorthodox man approached attacked him with a knife, according to Haaretz newspaper.
Kamal Dandis, the muezzin at the Mohammed Al Fatih mosque where Ishaq prayed, said: “I was extremely surprised. He’s very young.”
He linked the recent violence to the killing by Jewish extremists of a Palestinian toddler and his parents in the West Bank in July, other settler violence and to the “targeting” of Al Aqsa. “The situation in Jerusalem and at Al Aqsa and in the villages of Palestine – this leads the people, not just him, to reach a stage they never imagined they would actually reach.”
Mr Dandis said that youths such as Ishaq, who were born after the 1993 Oslo Agreement that established the Palestinian self-rule authority but failed to end Israeli occupation, are beyond the control of the Palestinian president. “The US, Britain, Israel and the [Palestinian] Authority thought that in the last 20 years these children would adapt to their ways, that they would contain them, but this did not happen,” he said.
Mr Badran said of his son: “I’m proud of him. He’s a free man. He did not accept the humiliation, the insult. He acted against the humiliation.”
But parents in Kufr Aqab said they were worried their children would seek to follow in Ishaq’s footsteps. “Even though my children are 12 and 14 they might imitate Ishaq,” said Imad, a neighbour who declined to give his family name. “In their view he’s a hero.”
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
