Warning - this article contains a graphic description of a shooting.
In the few moments of silence after the shootings, before he was dragged from the family car, 12-year-old Khaled Bani Odeh thought he was the only member of his family left alive.
Seconds before, his parents and two youngest brothers had been shot dead through the windscreen by Israeli forces, as they drove home after a family shopping trip in the occupied West Bank.
Among the dead was seven-year-old Othman - blind and disabled - killed while sitting on his mother's lap.
My mother cried out one last time before going quiet, Khaled said. My father recited the Shahada [the Islamic declaration of faith] as he died. When Israeli forces tried to drag his only surviving brother, Mustafa, from the car, Khaled said he tried to intervene. They pulled me out instead and began jumping on my back, he said. Then they took me to a corner and questioned me about who had been in the car. I told them it was my mother and father. They accused me of lying and started beating me.
The family of 37-year-old Ali Khaled Bani Odeh and his 35-year-old wife Waad had been minutes from home when they were killed, in the village of Tammun, near Tubas, just after midnight on Saturday. Relatives said Ali had recently arrived home in Tammun after six weeks working on a construction site in Israel, and the boys had begged him to take them shopping in Nablus, ahead of the Eid al-Fitr holiday due at the end of this week.
The Israeli army said its soldiers and Border Police were operating in Tammun to arrest people suspected of terrorist activity against Israeli security forces and that the Bani Odeh family's car had accelerated towards the forces, who sensed danger and responded by shooting. However, witnesses contradict this account, asserting the family car had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired.
The use of lethal force against the family has drawn criticism and intensified discussions about the patterns of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. The United Nations reports that over a thousand Palestinians have been killed in the region since October 2023, with 233 children among them.
