The following is a piece Bekah Wolf posted on Facebook about Yousef Fakhri Ikhlayl. Ikhlayl is a 17-year-old boy who was shot in the head and killed by Israeli settlers last Friday. Wolf worked with him in the Center for Freedom and Justice. According to a press release from the Palestine Solidarity Project, the Israeli military also attacked Ikhlayl’s funeral: “The Israeli military attacked the funeral around 12pm, shooting live and rubber bullets into the crowd as well as throwing sound bombs and tear gas. Over 40 people suffered from a range of injuries that included live gunshot wounds, none of which appeared serious.”
Yousef was the quiet one. As I look through photographs of the past few months’ demonstrations in Beit Ommar, I can find only one with Yousef, though he was always there. He was the older brother who was always tagging along while his cousin Ahmed, and brother Mohammed were marching at the front of the demonstrations. The three of them were fixtures at our events, whether it was summer camp, English class, or marches against settlement expansion. Yousef was the goofy one, with the adolescent mustache and too-big feet. He usually hung in the back, but he was always there.
Palestine Solidarity Project has been discussing how to commemorate the last death of a teen in Beit Ommar. Mehdi Abu Ayyesh, who was shot by Israeli soldiers on March 4, 2008 and died, having never regained brain activity, in October of 2008, got very little attention, his shooting overshadowed by the critical injury of an American activist in the West Bank a week later. So we’ve been discussing how to best honor this teen, 3 years later, and how we could connect it to all the other killings throughout the Palestinian Territories these past few years. I do not want to add Yousef to the list.
This morning, at around 9 am, 100 Israeli settlers (“my people”, so Israel would have me believe), carrying semi-automatic guns, broke into two groups and invaded Saffa (a “suburb” of Beit Ommar). Yousef was with his family among their grapevines when the settlers approached and began shooting. Yousef was shot in the head. He is clinically dead, though his parents cannot bear to remove his heart machine. The settlers remained in the area for nearly two hours, shooting another young man in the hand, as Palestinians from Sourif and Beit Ommar, carrying sticks, tried to protect their houses and their sons. Two hours, before the Israeli military, who can show up in the area in 5 minutes when we are planting trees, came and led the settlers back to Bat ‘Ayn. No arrests were made. Settlers said they were shot at, and I can do nothing but shake my head at the absurdity of that statement. Israeli media reported “clashes” without questioning what the settlers were doing in a Palestinian town to begin with. All of this involved settlers from Bat ‘Ayn, a settlement Mahmoud Abbas thinks should be allowed to stay.
I’ve been working in Palestine for almost 8 years. I have been to the funerals of 8 youth killed by Israeli forces and have mourned the loss of many more. Yousef is the first kid who had been in my home. The first one who I had sat with and worked with and joked with and ate with.
Of course, every young person killed in Palestine has friends and a family. The fact that I knew him is totally unimportant to the world at large, or the bigger political picture. But the fact remains: I look at his picture and he is familiar. I remember how he walked, how he sat, how he smiled. Yousef, ya ibni, you will be missed.
