Palestinian families seek justice for victims labeled 'terrorists' by Israeli authorities

Moira Jilani has been waiting sixteen years for her husband to come home. It is a wait that will never end. On June 11, 2010, Ziad Jilani was driving through the congested streets of Wadi al-Joz in occupied East Jerusalem when a rock shattered his windshield. He was caught between Israeli forces and Palestinian youths throwing stones. The impact caused him to swerve into a group of police officers, lightly injuring two of them. A border police officer opened fire. As Ziad fled his vehicle, he was shot in the back. Minutes later, as he lay on the ground, he was shot twice more in the head at close range. Within hours, Israeli authorities labeled him a terrorist.

Ziad had promised his three daughters that morning he would take them to the beach after Friday prayers. Instead of the beach, they went to his funeral. Moira still lives in her mother-in-law's building, the same place where the girls used to wait excitedly for their father to return from work. What she remembers most about Ziad is his laughter—not the video that Israeli rights investigators later assembled of his final moments, not the label that would follow him into death. He had Christian friends. He attended their weddings and bar mitzvahs. He served Jewish and Arab customers alike with no distinction. He was the kind of person, Moira said, whose personality drew you in.

An investigation by Israeli rights lawyers revealed that the officer who killed Ziad, Maxim Vinogradov, had posted online about his desire to kill Arabs less than two weeks before the shooting. The case against Vinogradov and his commanding officer was closed due to lack of evidence. Neither has faced trial. For sixteen years, Moira has raised their daughters alone, telling them not to search for their father online, where false information about him persists. She has had to explain to her children why their father is called a terrorist, why the label sticks even though he is dead, why it follows her when she wears a hijab but disappears when she wears a kippa.

Hussein Abu Khdeir remembers his son Mohammed singing and dancing as he ran home from school. In July 2014, three Israeli men circled the neighborhood of Shu'fat looking for a Palestinian child to abduct. Mohammed was sixteen, but small for his age—he looked twelve. At four in the morning, he was waiting at the front door of his home when a vehicle approached. He was driven to a forest in West Jerusalem, where he was beaten and burned alive. The three men—Yosef Haim Ben-David and two teenage relatives—had decided to murder Mohammed in revenge for the killing of three Israeli teenagers days earlier. Ben-David is serving a life sentence. The two minors received life and twenty-one years. All three convictions have been upheld on appeal. They admitted they killed him out of a terrorist motive, Hussein said. So why, he asked, is Mohammed not counted as a victim of terrorism?

More than a decade later, the political landscape in Israel has shifted in favor of the killers. Last October, fifty-five Israeli lawmakers, including eleven cabinet ministers such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, signed a letter calling for the pardon of Jewish Israelis convicted of killing Palestinians. Hussein's words carry the weight of a man watching his son's murderers potentially walk free: "There is no justice under Israeli authority. None. If a Palestinian had burned an Israeli, they'd have demolished his house and thrown his whole family in prison. These people did that to my son, and they are asking the government to let them go free."

The killings of Ziad and Mohammed are part of a longer catalog of deaths that both families recite from memory. Ahmed Erekat was shot dead at a checkpoint in 2020 on his sister's wedding day, initially wrongly accused of a car-ramming attack. Iyad Hallaq, a young autistic man, was shot by police in Jerusalem's Old City that same year as his caregiver screamed that he was unarmed and disabled. The officer was acquitted of negligent homicide in 2023. Awdah Hathaleen was filmed being shot by settler Yinon Levi in July 2025—the first indictment of an Israeli settler for killing a Palestinian since 2019. Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera correspondent wearing a press vest, was killed by Israeli forces in 2022 while covering a raid in Jenin. Four years later, no soldier has been charged.

A study by Yesh Din, a rights group documenting violations against Palestinians, found that only three percent of Israeli settlers investigated for crimes against Palestinians between 2005 and 2024 were ever convicted. Ninety-three point eight percent of investigations were closed without any indictment filed. Since October 2023 alone, Israeli forces have killed more than eleven hundred Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including two hundred forty-two minors. Arson attacks on Palestinian homes have become routine. Settlers comment in chat groups about burning mosques and homes—events that once brought global outcry but have now become ordinary in the occupied West Bank. Ali Dawabsheh, an infant, was killed alongside his parents when an Israeli settler firebombed their home in Duma in July 2015. His older brother, then four, survived with severe burns. The attacker, Amiram Ben-Uliel, was convicted of murder in 2020 and sentenced to three life terms. He has since become the subject of a crowdfunding campaign to secure his release, which has raised more than a million shekels thanks to support from sitting Israeli lawmakers.

Human rights groups say the lack of accountability is the defining feature of Israel's two-tiered system of justice. Yair Dvir, spokesperson for B'Tselem, described Israel's military law enforcement system not as a genuine mechanism for uncovering truth but as a whitewashing mechanism designed to create the appearance of investigation. "In practice, these investigations shield those responsible and allow Israel to continue implementing the same policies without interruption." The word "terrorist" itself functions as a mechanism of impunity, said Tahseen Elayyan, deputy director of Al-Haq. "It is one of the ways through which Israeli occupying authorities deprive Palestinian victims of the protection accorded to them by international law. If you want to escape this protection, the easiest recipe is to say: these are terrorists. That is the easiest way to shield the perpetrators from accountability."

For Moira, the passage of time has not brought closure, only new ways of carrying the burden. She has worked partly through her grief via Parents Circle, which brings together bereaved Palestinian and Israeli families. She raises her youngest daughter, who was six when Ziad was killed, on stories of her father. Asked what she would say to Ziad now, sixteen years later, she did not hesitate: "I still love him. I think I love him more now than I did back then, because you look back and you see everything that he did for you. He opened my eyes to what's going on here, and he left it for me to see it. And boy, did I see it. I'm still seeing it."