Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.
On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.
They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.
As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire.
The Israeli police and military, in a joint statement Sunday morning, said that border police officers and soldiers, while on a mission in Tammun to arrest suspected terrorists, had “sensed danger” after a vehicle “accelerated towards” them and “responded by shooting.” They said the circumstances of the episode were being investigated.
The two accounts could not have been more contradictory. But one fact was undisputed: Mr. Bani Odeh, 37, his wife, Othman and Muhammad were all shot and killed.
The Israeli-occupied West Bank is under siege as it has not been in years, with extremist Israeli settlers terrorizing Palestinian villagers on hillsides and in valleys where they live near one another. The body count is rapidly piling up: Seven Palestinians have been killed so far this year, all but one of those since the war with Iran began on Feb. 28.
The Israeli military, which is the governing authority in the West Bank, has condemned settler violence and insists that it is working to prevent it. The Israeli police, who are responsible for investigating crime committed by Israelis in the West Bank, say they act against any violence, but have largely failed in bringing violent settlers to justice.
But Tammun is deep inside the territory governed and policed by the Palestinian Authority, far from the friction with settlers. And Mr. Bani Odeh believed that, even if he encountered Israeli soldiers, he had little to fear, according to his father, Khaled Sayl Bani Odeh, 65. He knew he posed no threat, and believed that if stopped, he could talk his way out of any trouble — in fluent Hebrew — thanks to his experience working inside Israel.
On Saturday, Ali Bani Odeh was reluctant to take the boys on an outing, his father said. He was tired and wanted to rest. But the boys were restless, and he gave in.
Muhammad, the youngest, usually stayed with his grandparents because he was hyperactive, according to the elder Khaled Bani Odeh. “I was trying to tell him not to go,” he said at the family’s wake on Sunday afternoon. “But his grandmother said, ‘It’s not far, let him go.’”
Little Muhammad asked his grandfather to fix his hair and give him some of his cologne. “I did, and he set off,” Mr. Bani Odeh said.
Later Saturday night, as the grandfather was watching soccer on television, he said, his wife prodded him to call their son and check on them.
“I said, ‘They’re in a car with the children — there’s nothing that can happen to them,’” he recalled ruefully, as dozens of men streamed into the cavernous social hall where he sat, paying their respects.
Palestinian security officials said they had been briefed by their Israeli counterparts only after the fact, and told that the Israeli police and military mission in Tammun was to arrest two youths: one suspected of making explosive devices, the other of using social media to incite violence against Israelis.
Israeli officials mentioned only people suspected of making explosive devices.
Liron Rubin, a spokesman for the border police, said that the officers and soldiers had signaled for the vehicle to stop using flashlights and laser pointers but that it kept coming toward them.
“They’re a very professional force,” said Dean Elsdunne, another police spokesman. “If they felt their life was at risk when they’re operating there against terrorists in a very dangerous place, it’s for them to say.”
They declined to discuss other details of the case, citing the investigation underway.
Khaled and Mustafa, the surviving boys, spoke later outside the women’s wake for the family at a home uphill from the social hall. Mustafa wore a bandage across his nose, where he said he had been hit by shrapnel from a bullet.
He described trying to pull 5-year-old Muhammad toward him, to help him, but said that his brother was already dead.
Khaled, a sixth-grader, did most of the talking.
“When the shooting stopped, I opened the door and started yelling, ‘Please help me,’” he said. He said the soldiers told him to shut up, and that one pulled him out of the car by his hair. He said he had been thrown to the ground and stepped on, questioned aggressively about whether anyone else had been in the car, and beaten on the head and legs.
An Arabic-speaking soldier spoke to him kindly, calling him “Habibi,” but then kicked him repeatedly, Khaled said.
When Khaled told the soldiers that he and his brother needed a bathroom, he said, the soldiers pointed them in the direction of a Palestinian ambulance that had been waiting about 100 meters away. As they walked that way, he said, a soldier opened the door of his family’s car. Inside, he said, he saw his dead parents.
Khaled’s grandfather said he had seen his slain family members’ bodies at the hospital. His daughter-in-law had been shot multiple times in her head and chest. Young Muhammad was shot several times in the face.
His 11-year-old namesake, visibly numb, said he had found part of his little brother’s body on his shoes.
“It’s indescribable,” Khaled said. “One or two hours before, we were in Nablus. They took us to so many places. They bought us doughnuts. Then we were on our way home.”
They never got the doughnut holes out of the bag.
David M. Halbfinger is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. He also held that post from 2017 to 2021. He was the politics editor from 2021 to 2025.
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