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Israeli troops killed a seven-month-old Palestinian baby boy after firing at his parents’ vehicle in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said.
Sam Fahd Abu Haikal was killed Friday evening, and his parents were wounded while driving in the Tel Rumeida area south of Hebron City, according to the ministry.
The official Palestinian news agency WAFA said the baby was critically wounded after being struck in the face by the same bullet that injured his mother. He later died of his injuries. His father, Fahd Abu Haikal, a lecturer at Bethlehem University, was shot in the hand. They were traveling from Bethlehem to visit family in Hebron when soldiers opened fire, the agency reported.
Photos from the Associated Press show that the baby’s carseat was behind the driver’s seat of the vehicle. Photos also show damage, including at least one bullet hole, in the car’s windshield.
Mahmoud Illean/AP
Israel’s military has scaled up military operations in the West Bank since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack that killed some 1,200 people and took 251 people hostage, which triggered the war in Gaza. Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has so far killed more than 72,900 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The ministry, which is part of the Hamas-led government, is generally seen as reliable by United Nations agencies and independent experts.
A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces told CBS News that soldiers “perceived a vehicle accelerating toward them” in the Hebron area. A soldier responded by firing single shots, the spokesperson said. The statement said three Palestinians were injured and evacuated for medical treatment, but did not confirm the age or gender of any of the injured.
An initial inquiry “found that those injured were uninvolved civilians,” the IDF spokesperson said, adding that the incident is under review and that the IDF “expresses deep sorrow for any harm caused to uninvolved individuals.”
At Al-Ahly Hospital in Hebron, the baby’s father told Associated Press reporters that a bullet struck the car’s windshield before piercing his hand, then his son and wife.
“It entered the child’s face on the right side and exited on the left, then passed directly into his mother’s face and exited on the other side, with shrapnel lodged near her heart,” Abu Haikal said.
Mahmoud Illean/AP 
The mother is in critical condition because there’s shrapnel close to her heart, he said. They haven’t told her yet that her son, who turned seven months old on Friday, was killed.
The baby’s grandmother, Feryal Abu Heikal, was in the car during the shooting and said they were driving near a checkpoint and stopped when they saw Israeli military vehicles and soldiers in the distance. As the forces fired at them, she initially thought it was warning shots before they were struck, she said.
“The scene was horrific to see a seven-month-old baby with a smashed face,” she said. “What kind of army in the world does this? … What happened to my grandson can’t be easily forgotten.”
The baby’s funeral is expected later Saturday.
The British consulate in Jerusalem said it was “shocked and saddened” by the incident, saying on social media that it was calling for an “immediate and transparent investigation and accountability” and that “civilians must be protected.”
Mahmoud Illean/AP 
The United Nations said last month that more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and east Jerusalem since the war began. At least 240 of them children, according to the U.N. Forty-nine people have been killed since the start of 2026, it said.
In March, Israeli soldiers fired on a car carrying a family in the northern West Bank, killing four people, including two children, the Palestinian Authority’s Health Ministry said at the time.
Israeli soldiers accused of harming Palestinians are rarely penalized and were indicted in fewer than 1% of cases based on 2,427 complaints alleging wrongdoing between 2016 and 2024, according to Israeli rights group Yesh Din.
More than 700,000 Israelis live in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, territories captured by Israel in 1967 from Jordan and sought by the Palestinians for a future state.
