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| Footage from inside the Mughayyir school shows terrified children and teachers crouched in stairwells. |
Emma Graham-Harrison, Sufian Taha and Quique Kierszenbaum in MughayyirSat 2 May 2026
The Israeli reservist shot 14-year-old Aws
al-Naasan in the head just outside the western gate of the Mughayyir
boys’ secondary school, where he was studying in ninth grade.
Aws
collapsed instantly, bleeding heavily. More shots rang out as his
friends ran to his side, picked up his now-limp body and rushed him out
of the line of fire, their path along the school wall marked by a trail
of their classmate’s blood.
Footage
from inside the building showed terrified children and teachers
crouched in stairwells, shouting at others to get down. Another video
captured the shooter, a reservist in partial military uniform, taking
aim at the school from the hillside above.
A few minutes later the same man killed the
younger brother of an English teacher Waheed Abu Naim, whose family live
beside the school. Jihad Abu Naim was 36; his wife is heavily pregnant
with the couple’s first child, a girl due this month.
Aws and Abu Naim were shot dead on 21 April amid a wave of settler violence in the occupied West Bank, much of which has targeted schools and students in the territory.
Mughayyir,
a village of about 3,000 people nestled in the rolling hills north-east
of Ramallah, has been targeted for many years. Aws’s father, Hamdi
al-Naasan, was killed in January 2019, shot in the back by a settler as he tried to rescue an injured neighbour.
Aws
was only in third grade at the time, and his teachers devoted extra
attention to the young boy in the years that followed. “We tried to make
Aws feel safe, and ensure he had some rules in his life, to protect him
from the impact of losing his father,” said Waheed Abu Naim. “Then we
lost him.”
After the killings, classes in
Mughayyir were suspended for a week as parents and teachers weighed up
hopes for their children’s futures against immediate fears for their
lives. “We want to go back to school, but our families are worried,”
said Ahmed Abu Ali, a friend and classmate of the murdered teenager.
Education is under attack across occupied
Palestine. The situation is most severe in Gaza, where more than 600,000
school-age children are approaching the end of a third year without
formal in-person education. Israeli attacks there have killed at least
792 teachers and 18,639 students, according to the UN, and damaged or destroyed nine out of 10 school buildings.
But students and schools are also targets of spiralling Israeli violence in the occupied West Bank, where there is a climate of near total impunity for attacks on Palestinians.... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/02/israeli-militants-attack-west-bank-schools-settler-violence
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