Most Israelis will never see the crushed expression of Mustafa Bani Odeh, eight, tears streaming down his bruised face as he attended the funeral of his family, who were killed by Israeli troops on Sunday.
Ali Khaled Bani Odeh, 37, his wife Waad Othman Bani Odeh, 35, and their two children, Othman, seven, and Mohammed, five, were shot and killed. Israeli media said the attack was carried out by an “elite unit”.
Only the most left-wing news outlets and corners of social media in Israel told in detail the horror of what befell Mustafa and his brother, Khaled, 11, the only survivors of the hail of bullets. He said he was pulled by his hair from the car in which his family lay, with Israeli troops saying: “We killed dogs."
Khaled said the family came under "direct fire" but did not know at the time who was shooting. "Everyone in the car was martyred, except my brother Mustafa and me,” he added.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society said Israeli forces prevented its medics from the reaching the family. They were only allowed to return later to retrieve the bodies.
Right-wing Israeli news outlet Channel 14 reported the killings under the headline: "Ramming attack foiled in Samaria: Four terrorists eliminated," using a biblical term to refer to a part of the occupied West Bank.
“The fighters sensed immediate danger and responded with precise fire that neutralised the threat,” the report said. The terms it used assign more blame to the family for their killing than the joint statement from the police and military. It said: “During the operation, a vehicle accelerated towards the forces, who perceived an immediate threat to their safety and responded with gunfire. As a result, four Palestinians who were in the vehicle were killed.”
Other outlets barely mentioned the incident, despite it being committed by Israeli troops in occupied territory, in the shadow of an Israeli settlement.
Left-wing outlet Haaretz was an exception. It published an editorial on Monday that said: "Responsibility for killing the Bani Odeh family in Tammun in the northern Jordan Valley overnight Saturday rests with the [Israeli military's] senior command, police and the Israeli government. Excuses won't help: without justification, an undercover Border Police unit in the West Bank shot at a car innocently carrying a father, mother and four children on their way home. The soldiers were in no danger and, even if they sensed it, nothing can justify the heavy and indiscriminate gunfire."
In a post on X, Israeli journalist Etan Nechin lamented the coverage of one of the country’s main outlets, Channel 12. He said that "53 seconds before sign-off, Israel’s most-watched news show News 12 mentions IDF killing a Palestinian family in the West Bank. Dad. Mum. Kids aged five and seven. No names. No faces. No follow-up on the surviving children. 53 seconds. That’s the airtime a family’s death is worth.”
Israeli reporter Hagar Shezaf called on her colleagues to do more to cover such stories. She said that, in most cases of the Israeli military killing Palestinian children or teenagers, bereaved family members “wanted to talk, even with the Israeli media”.
“[Killings such as this] are completely normal in the West Bank, swallowed up amid reports from an indifferent media, which of course helped the army's ‘law enforcement’ system continue to do nothing at all,” she said in a post on X.
The killing of the family comes amid a sharp increase in Israeli military and settler violence in the West Bank since the start of the Iran war.
