The Abu Khdeir family

The Abu Khdeirs are a Shu’fat family. That is the first and most important thing to say about them, because outside Palestine the name arrived all at once, in July 2014, attached to a killing — and a family that has lived on the ridge north of Jerusalem for generations became, in the world’s telling, an event.

The documentary record is modest and it is Shu’fat’s own. When the Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem compiled its town profile in 2013, the Shu’fat Services Committee named the town’s principal families as the Issa, Abu Khdeir, Ziyadah, Muhammad, al-Mashni and Awad Allah households. Palestinian locality encyclopaedias set out a clan structure beneath those names, placing the Hasan and Husayn families under Abu Khdeir, but they flag their own lists as preliminary, and this record does the same. Beyond that, the archive has not found published genealogical work on the family, and does not invent any.

What happened in July 2014

On 2 July 2014 Mohammed Abu Khdeir, sixteen years old, was seized close to his home in Shu’fat, driven to the Jerusalem Forest, beaten and burned alive. On 19 April 2016 the Jerusalem District Court convicted Yosef Haim Ben-David of murder, kidnapping for the purpose of murder, and battery causing bodily harm; on 3 May 2016 it sentenced him to life imprisonment, with a further twenty years for other offences, and ordered 150,000 shekels in compensation to the family. Two others, minors at the time, had already been sentenced in February 2016 — one to life, one to twenty-one years. Members of the family were in the courtroom when Ben-David was taken away.

The day after the killing, at a protest in occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli police beat Mohammed’s cousin Tariq Abu Khdeir unconscious and arrested him. Tariq was a Palestinian-American teenager visiting from Tampa, Florida — The archive found no published account of the family’s wider dispersal, and does not infer one from a single visit. Video of the beating drew international attention. In November 2015 an Israeli magistrate’s court sentenced one border police officer to forty-five days of community service and a suspended four-month prison term; the judge, Dana Cohen-Lekach, found there had been “no need and no justification to exert further force,” and that the officer had beaten Tariq with his fists and kicked him “in the head, face, shoulders and upper body.” One officer was charged.

Notable members

• Mohammed Abu Khdeir (1997–2014) — sixteen years old, seized near his home in Shu’fat on 2 July 2014 and burned alive; three people were convicted of the killing in 2016.
• Tariq Abu Khdeir — his cousin, a Palestinian-American from Tampa, Florida, beaten unconscious and arrested by Israeli police at a protest in East Jerusalem in July 2014; one officer was sentenced to community service in November 2015.

Sources

• Encyclopaedia of Palestinian Villages — Shu’fat, families and clans — the roll of hamayil above. The encyclopaedia labels its own list “preliminary information, may need review” (هذه معومات أولية قد تحتاج مراجعة), and we carry that caveat with it.

• Shu’fat Town Profile — Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem (ARIJ), 2013, for the town’s principal families

• Israeli Court Convicts Primary Suspect in Abu-Khdeir Murder — WAFA, 19 April 2016

• Life term for Palestinian Mohammed Abu Khdeir’s murder — Al Jazeera, 3 May 2016

• US-Palestinian teen describes Israeli beating — Al Jazeera, 31 July 2014

• Israeli officer sentenced for beating Palestinian-American teen — Middle East Eye, 19 November 2015