They are using US tax dollars to ‘kill our own children’, says father after Israeli soldiers and settlers opened fire, killing his 17-year-old son.
Palestinian-American Tawfiq Ajaq, 17, is one of 369 people killed by Israeli troops and settlers in the occupied West Bank since October, including 95 children.
Speaking at his son’s funeral on Saturday, Tawfiq’s father, Hafez Ajaq, implored Americans to “see with their own eyes” the ongoing violence in the occupied West Bank.
“They are using our tax dollars in the US to support the weapons to kill our own children,” Hafez Ajaq said. “How many fathers and mothers have to say goodbye to their children? How many more?
“They are killer machines,” Tawfiq’s father said of Israeli forces at the funeral.
Born and raised in Gretna, Louisiana, near New Orleans, Tawfiq Ajaq’s parents brought him and his four siblings to the village of al-Mazra’a Asharqiya last year so they could reconnect with Palestinian culture.
On Saturday, crowds of Palestinians filled village streets, following men who held aloft a stretcher with the teen’s body, wrapped in a Palestinian flag and covered in flowers.
Another vigil held at the Masjid Omar mosque in Harvey, New Orleans was standing room only, according to the New Orleans news outlet NOLA.com.
He said Tawfiq died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
“Tawfiq is an American child who was chased and shot at by an Israeli settler, then Israeli forces pulled up and continued shooting,” Miranda Cleland, an advocacy officer with Defense for Children Palestine, said in a post on X.
“This is not the first time Defense for Children Palestine hasn’t been able to confirm whether a settler or soldier killed a child. One aids and abets the other,” Cleland said.
The United States Office of Palestinian Affairs called for an “urgent investigation” into Ajaq’s death in a post on X.
Circumstances unclear
Various English spellings of the teen’s name have been used in reports.
In its daily update for Friday, the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA reported a “17-year-old Palestinian child was shot and killed” near al-Mazra’a Asharqiya village in Ramallah where Tawfiq Ajaq lived.
According to OCHA’s latest figures, of 358 Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank since October 7, “348 were killed by Israeli forces, eight by Israeli settlers, and two by either Israeli forces or settlers”.
Israeli police said they received a report on Friday regarding a “firearm discharge, ostensibly involving an off-duty law enforcement officer, a soldier and a civilian”.
Police did not identify who fired the shot, though it said the shooting targeted people “purportedly engaged in rock-throwing activities along Highway 60″, the main north-south thoroughfare in the occupied West Bank.
The ongoing violence in the occupied West Bank comes as the death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza approaches 25,000, with thousands more missing under the rubble.
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