Two Palestinian teens were riding a motorbike in Nablus when a convoy of Border Police passed by. The officers first claimed the two shot at them, then said that they just pointed a gun, which was never found. It doesn’t change the outcome: The officers shot one of the teens as he fled, riddling his body with bullets
Horrorific images, utterly appalling, showing the corpse of a 16-year-old boy riddled with bullet holes. The entire body of Nader Rayan , son to a refugee family from the Balata refugee camp abutting Nablus, is strewn with deep, bleeding bullet wounds, his flesh is bare, his brain is spilling out, his head and face are perforated. Border Police troops shot him with pathological madness, in a rage, savagely, without restraint. His father counted 12 bullet wounds in his son’s body, all of them deep, large, oozing blood. Head, chest, stomach, back, legs and arms: There’s not a part of his son’s body without a large, gaping hole in it.
Nothing can justify this repeated shooting of a teenager who was running for his life, certainly not once he was hit and lay wounded on the road. Not even if the initial Border Police account, which for some reason was magically altered the following week – that the youth or his friend shot at the troops – is correct. Nothing can justify such unhinged shooting at a youth.
The incident occurred early last Tuesday, March 15. At 6 A.M. Nader’s father, Haytham, a retired police officer of 48, left the house to pick up two of his nephews, who are fatherless, and drive them to school in Nablus. He relates that he saw Nader still asleep on the living room sofa. Eighteen years ago, the family extricated itself from the Balata camp and moved to the other side of the main thoroughfare that leads into Nablus, Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Road. According to the family, Nader got up a few minutes later, dressed and set off on his motorbike to pick up his friend from the neighborhood, on their way to the coffee stand they had opened three weeks earlier in Balata. A few minutes later, Nader lay dead by the side of the road, his body riddled with bullets.
There is a huge memorial poster of Nader now hanging in his home, covering a large part of the living room wall, and opposite it the picture of the crying child that used to be a staple in many Israeli homes. Haytham, the father, worked in the Palestinian police force until taking early retirement in 2017. He and his wife, Samiha, had six sons and three daughters. Nader had dropped out of school after the ninth grade along with S., his good friend and neighbor. At first he worked in a carpentry shop that refurbished furniture, and a few weeks ago he and S., along with Nader’s older brothers, Mohammed and Hassan, aged 25 and 23, opened the modest coffee stand in Balata. Their clients included workers as they set out in the morning and returned in the evening.
Nader left home that morning at 6:15 A.M., on his black, rundown, unlicensed motorbike, and picked up S., who was already waiting for him, on their way to their new business in the camp. Following their morning routine, they took the road that descends from their neighborhood to the Jerusalem Road and crossed it. Suddenly, the friend says, they saw a convoy of armored vehicles coming from the direction of the camp.
A 90-second video circulated on social media shows what happened next. The convoy is proceeding along the road, the motorbike is advancing from the other side. It’s 6:19. Suddenly the bike stops and the passenger jumps off and starts running. Immediately after him the driver also gets off, discarding the motorbike on the road, and starts to run with his friend toward the alley that descends from the main road. The alley swallows them up.
The armored convoy comes to a halt. A few very long seconds pass until the back door of one of the vehicles opens. Five Border Police troops leap out and run into the alley in pursuit of the youths, who are out of the camera’s range. Another armored vehicle appears from the other direction and rumbles down the alley in the wake of the youths. A car that happens on the scene is chased off at rifle-point by a Border Policeman. There is no stone throwing on the road, which is otherwise empty and quiet at this early hour.
The armored convoy was on the way back from Balata after carrying out a night raid for the purpose of arresting a resident, Amar Arafat, who was wanted for being in possession of a rifle. Having taken Arafat into custody and impounding his rifle, the force was returning to its base.
Nothing in the video accounts for why the two youths suddenly stopped, abandoned the motorbike and ran for their lives. S. told us this week that the bike had stalled and that they took fright at the military vehicles. The clip does not support this account. The motorbike does not appear to have stalled – it looks as though the driver tried to turn around and then left it on the ground.
A video clip disseminated by the police shows sudden flashes of light in the interior of an armored vehicle. The Border Police say it was gunfire, directed at their personnel. The body camera of the policeman that captured the scene continues to film as the door of the vehicle opens and he runs into the alley until he stops next to a wounded or dead person lying on the ground. That was Nader Rayan.
A Border Police communiqué issued after the incident stated: “During activity of Border Police mista’arvim [undercover officers posing as local Arabs] in the Balata refugee camp, a wanted individual was arrested and a rifle that was in his possession seized. As the forces left, violent disruptions began in which explosive devices, stones and various objects were thrown at the fighters, who responded with crowd-dispersal means and with Ruger rifle fire. During the activity, a motorbike appeared carrying two terrorists. One of the terrorists got off the motorbike and fired a pistol at the Border Police mista’arvim, who responded immediately with gunfire and neutralized the terrorist.”
This week, in an additional response from the Border Police, the claim about the shooting had disappeared, and Haaretz was told that the fighters had “returned fire at a terrorist who endangered their lives, after bursting into their car and aiming a revolver at them.” A question that went unanswered was why the officers felt the need to fire 12 bullets into the body of the youth; to that point they had no response.
Additionally, with regard to what happened to the smoking weapon, there were several different responses. Initially, the Border Police claimed that “the second youth took the pistol,” whereas in this week’s statement, they said that “a search did not turn up the weapon, and the fighters who were present hurried to depart the scene.”
S., the teen who was with Nader, has the face of a child. But, this week he did not look like someone who would hide or run for his life from the security forces because of a pistol. He denies its existence. The Border Police force also made no effort to find him after venting its rage on Nader’s small body. This week, at the scene of the incident, S. showed us where he hid from the troops – behind a building next to a school, at the bottom of the street. It wouldn’t have been hard to find him there if the Border Police were really searching for an armed and dangerous terrorist, as they described the youth. Two bullet holes from the incident are visible in the school’s iron gate.
At 6:30, a few minutes after his son had been shot to death, Haytham was next to the muqata – the Palestinian Authority’s administrative center – in Nablus, on the way to his nephews’ school. He then saw a message on social media stating that a motorbike driver had been wounded by the army next to the camp. He called Nader but got no response. Now, as the father shows us the photograph of his son’s body on his cellphone, he lowers his voice so that the mother and the younger children will not hear what the body was subjected to. For his part, S. relates that the first bullet struck Nader in the shoulder and that he fell to the ground. That was the last he saw of him, as he continued to run. Why did the Border Police go on shooting him in a fit of fury and revenge?
One thing is clear: If Nader had been a Ukrainian teen who opened fire with a gun at an armored force of the Russian army that had invaded his country, he would have been transformed into an iconic hero and freedom fighter – in Israel, too. But Nader wasn’t a Ukrainian youth, he was from a Palestinian refugee family, so he is considered a “terrorist” who must die and be subjected to a barbaric “kill confirmation.” His police officer father says that bullet wounds as large as these could only be caused by shooting from point-blank range.
At 6:29, 10 minutes after it all started, Mohammed, Nader’s eldest brother, arrived on the scene and saw his brother’s body sprawled in the alley. The intense, heavy gunfire had apparently turned the body over: When Nader was hit by the first bullet, S. related, he fell on his stomach – now he was lying on his back.
S. leads us between the still-visible bloodstains along his and Nader’s path of flight. A circle of stones around a photo of Nader is the makeshift memorial that his friends have created, exactly at the spot where he collapsed and died, a few steps from where he took his first shot. A few chrysanthemums lie amid the circle of stones, wilted and withered.
