'The lives they left behind also reveal something simpler: the desire to live normally, to make plans and to have a future.'
His last moments at home were spent joking and laughing with his two brothers, Tamer, 18, and Milad, 10, and his mother.
“He was joking with us and playfully swatting at us with whatever he could find,” Mona Jaber, Ameer’s mother, told The Electronic Intifada.
It would be his last time. When he left the house he walked into an unexpected Israeli military raid.
He was shot, apparently at random, and wounded and died later in hospital.
“I left for a visit nearby, and Ameer also left the house,” Mona recalled. “While he was walking alone, a convoy of Israeli military jeeps raided the area. Suddenly, he was shot in the waist. Soon afterward, he was killed.”
A video of the aftermath of the shooting circulated widely on social media. It shows Ameer lying on the ground in a wide empty area before first one then two young men rush toward him and carry him away.
Mona was unable to watch the video until three days after the condolences began.
“The military jeeps were far away from Ameer,” she concluded from what she saw. “He was alone in the yard, and I believe a sniper shot him from a distance.”
It was about an hour after Mona had left home that she heard that Israeli forces had entered their suburb. She then received a phone call from her husband’s cousin telling her that Ameer had been injured.
“I rushed to the hospital in Ramallah. When I arrived, I saw the ambulance full of blood, and there was blood along the way to the entrance,” she said. “At that moment, I realized it was not just an injury and that he had passed away.”
Official denial
Mona said hospital staff initially prevented her from entering the room where Ameer had been taken. But she insisted.
“I saw many doctors surrounding his body. My son’s blood was everywhere, and they were trying to resuscitate him.”
His death shocked the entire family. Mona said she had never imagined that one of her sons would be killed, despite living under Israeli occupation and experiencing repeated military raids.
She required medical treatment after his death, and spent much of the time sedated.
This was not the first encounter with Israel’s occupying soldiers Ameer had experienced, his mother said.
“A week before his martyrdom, Israeli soldiers shot him with a rubber-coated bullet in his leg in Qalandiya refugee camp while he was on his way to work early in the morning,” Mona said.
Like many teenagers in occupied Palestine, Ameer had found a job to help out his family amid a desperate economic situation and with his father in an Israeli prison on a civil charge.
Four days after Ameer was killed, Mona said, she was called for questioning by Israeli police.
“When the officer saw me, he asked why I wasn’t wearing makeup, as if he didn’t know about his killing,” she recalled.
According to Mona, the officer then told her that Ameer was not dead but was being held in an Israeli prison, where he would soon face trial, and that she would later be summoned to attend.
“I argued with him. I told him this was impossible. I had seen my son’s body myself. I knew he was dead,” she said.
No summons has materialized and Mona concluded that the officer was simply trying to torment her.
But because Israel is not officially acknowledging Ameer’s death, the family has been unable to obtain an Israeli death certificate and could register his death only through the Palestinian authorities.
She also said that after Ameer was killed, Israeli prison authorities placed his father in solitary confinement.
According to the Palestinian human rights group, Al-Haq, from January 2026 until mid-July, 12 Jerusalemites had been killed by Israeli forces, including two children.
Dreams and a sense of humor
Ameer was ambitious and, despite his young age, was determined to achieve what he wanted, his mother said.
“He managed to achieve and buy many things. He even bought a car and a Vespa scooter despite his father’s refusal and later sold it,” Mona said, a testament both to the boy’s enterprise and the legal limbo in which Palestinians in Jerusalem live.
“I believe that if Ameer had remained alive, he could have achieved anything he wanted.”
On his social media accounts, Ameer frequently wrote about his best friend Hamza, who had been imprisoned by Israel about a year earlier and who, according to the family, still did not know that Ameer had been killed, since visits and phone calls from friends and family are largely denied Palestinian prisoners. Ameer shared photographs of Hamza on social media and covered the wall of his room with pictures of his friend.
Tamer, 18, was Ameer’s closest brother and companion. Both brothers had left school and worked at a supermarket inside Israel after their father was detained.
“Our lives were mostly between work and home. We hardly saw anyone, and no one saw us.” Tamer told The Electronic Intifada.
“We were carrying responsibility because our father was absent,” he added, before describing their commute to work: “Ameer was always sleeping and resting on the bus, in the car, wherever he could.”
Tamer said he remembers his brother vividly and is still trying to comprehend his sudden death.
Mona Jaber holds out a picture of a young Ameer.
“On the Friday before Ameer’s martyrdom, three days before he was killed, he slept for 24 hours for the first time in his life,” Tamer recalled. “I actually thought he had died. I told my mother to wake him, but then he woke up on his own.”
Tamer said his brother was a gregarious boy with a sense of humor.
“He wanted to do everything. He had many dreams,” Tamer said.
“On the day of his martyrdom, he told me he would buy a house and divide it into two apartments, one for each of us. He laughed in a very strange way, and then he left.”
For Milad, Ameer was not only an older brother but also a companion who took him out and tried to make him happy.
“Ameer and I used to play together a lot. He took me to buy sweets and to the amusement park, and he bought me a scooter,” Milad said.
Mona has not been able to put away Ameer’s clothes and belongings. His room remains as he left it.
She visits it every day, often joined by family members and friends who continue to come to the house.
The family also visits Ameer’s grave in al-Bireh cemetery every week, talking to him and reading verses from the Quran. Tamer sometimes visits the grave with his friends.
“I cry every day when I visit his room,” Mona said, remembering his favorite dishes, and the many daily activities and moments they once shared.
Two boys, one pattern
A week after Ameer was killed, his close friend Waleed Abu Sneneh, also 15, was killed during an Israeli raid on Qalandiya refugee camp, north of Jerusalem, on 5 July 2026, with Ameer, the second Palestinian Jerusalemite child Israel killed this year.
The Jaber family are originally from Deir Yassin, the Jerusalem-area village where Palestinians were massacred and which was depopulated during the Nakba in 1948.
The family reflects the complicated reality faced by Palestinians from Jerusalem who live between the city and communities beyond Israel’s wall in the West Bank.
To preserve their Jerusalem residency and blue Israeli identification cards, the family maintains a residence in Shuafat, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, in addition to their home near Ramallah. Like many others they face Israeli residency requirements and high taxes.
Ameer and Waleed, like other young Palestinians facing financial pressures on their families, left school early to enter the workforce, taking on responsibilities usually carried by adults.
Al-Haq said its documentation of the killings of Ameer and Waleed follows a multi-source field methodology that includes interviews with relatives of those killed, on-site inspections, eyewitness testimonies and the review and analysis of video footage.
According to Al-Haq, three Israeli military jeeps had left Amari refugee camp – east of Ramallah – and passed through the neighborhood where Ameer was staying. The vehicles stopped near Deir Tarif wedding hall, where a number of children were gathered.
Israeli forces fired tear gas to disperse them, according to Al-Haq. Ameer was in a nearby open area approximately 50 to 60 meters from the military vehicles when he was shot. Some witnesses said he tried to throw stones at the soldiers, even though they were clearly too far away.
In Waleed’s case, Al-Haq reported that the 15-year-old was killed by a single shot during an Israeli military incursion into Qalandiya refugee camp. The boy had stood on a roof with other children.
While there was stone throwing, none of the children posed any threat to soldiers.
Waleed was shot and killed nonetheless.
Like Ameer, Waleed had also left school at an early age to be a barber’s apprentice.
Al-Haq collects and documents Israeli violations of international law in order to submit to international legal bodies like the International Criminal Court and “to assist investigations concerning Palestine,” Tahseen Elayyan, Al-Haq’s program director, told The Electronic Intifada.
He described Israeli practices in the West Bank and Gaza, including the targeting and killing of children, as war crimes and as part of what he characterized as a “slow collective genocide.”
“There is no difference from Gaza except in the speed,” he said.
“The large number of children documented as killed throughout the prolonged years of occupation has increased since 7 October,” Elayyan added. “In many of the cases we documented, we observed deliberate killings that could have been avoided. The Palestinian people are the main target, while children are the nerve and the future.”
Work or education
Ameer’s decision to leave school and work was not simply an individual choice. His story, and that of Waleed, reflects the wider political and economic conditions as well as movement restrictions that place education increasingly out of reach for some Palestinian children from Jerusalem and surrounding areas.
Mohammad Sami, of the Palestinian Ministry of Education, told The Electronic Intifada that Palestinian students in Jerusalem and its surrounding areas face systematic obstacles that make continuing their education increasingly difficult.
“Israel has imposed repeated restrictions on the Palestinian curriculum in an attempt to undermine Palestinian identity,” Sami said. “At the same time, teachers from the West Bank face difficulties obtaining permits to reach their schools, while restrictions on building permits prevent the construction of adequate new schools.”
He said these restrictions have forced the Palestinian Ministry of Education and the administrative body for religious endowments to rent buildings that were not designed to serve as schools and often lack sufficient space and facilities for students.
“The proliferation of checkpoints and military gates has also fragmented movement between communities outside the apartheid separation wall and Jerusalem, causing students and teachers repeated delays and obstructing their access to schools,” Sami said.
“Ultimately, these measures undermine students’ right to education, a right protected under international law.”
Sami said obtaining precise figures on school dropout rates in Jerusalem is difficult because education is administered by several different authorities, including the Palestinian Ministry of Education, the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA), private schools, Israeli municipal schools and semi-private institutions.
“There is no unified system linking all these schools with the Palestinian Ministry of Education, which creates significant gaps in available data,” Sami said. “Therefore, it is difficult to determine an accurate dropout rate, even though the pressures imposed by the occupation are clearly contributing to students leaving school.”
Ameer and Waleed’s stories both illustrate how children can be confronted simultaneously with military violence, restrictions on movement, economic hardship and barriers to education, while being pushed to assume responsibilities far beyond their age.
Yet the lives they left behind also reveal something simpler: the desire to live normally, to make plans and to have a future.
Ameer, who had already left school to work, repeatedly urged his younger brother Milad not to follow the same path and to continue his education.
“I will study and finish high school and university,” Milad told The Electronic Intifada, repeating the future his brother wanted for him. “Then I will work.”
Israeli soldiers detain a young man during a raid on Qalandiya refugee camp in early August. A similar raid in early July resulted in the killing of a child, Waleed Abu Sneneh, the second Jerusalemite child the Israeli military has killed in 2026.
ZUMAPRESS/NewscomBothaina Hamdan is a Palestinian writer who lives in Ramallah and is originally a refugee from Annaba village, which was destroyed by Israeli forces during the Nakba in 1948.
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