The slumbering Dawabsheh family never stood a chance when a pair of arsonists crept into their home in a village in the West Bank in the early hours of Friday. A smashed window, a flaming molotov cocktail, a whoosh of fire and piercing screams followed.
Within minutes, the parents had crawled from the house with life-threatening third degree burns covering most of their bodies. Inside, four-year-old Ahmad was shrieking in fear and pain; his infant brother, Ali, just 18 months old, was dead or dying, his body burned beyond recognition.
Within hours, the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, condemned the attack – quickly attributed to extremist Israeli settlers – as an “act of terrorism”, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, denounced it as a “war crime”, and the European Union and United Nations had demanded swift action to bring the perpetrators to justice. Thousands of Palestinians attended Ali’s funeral and other protests in the West Bank, their anger fuelled by a litany of settler violence and intimidation.
The family’s home in Duma, near the Palestinian city of Nablus, was left blackened with soot and coated in ash, although graffiti left by the arsonists was still visible: “revenge”, “price tag” and “long live the Messiah” were scrawled in Hebrew letters.
According to witnesses, two men wearing black balaclavas firebombed the house just after 2am. Neighbour Ibrahim Dawabsheh, 23, a Palestinian construction worker in the nearby Jewish settlement Shilo, was talking to his fiancee on the phone on an upstairs balcony when he heard his neighbours’ screams.
“I heard Saad [the husband] shouting: ‘Help, they have slaughtered me.’ I dropped the phone and rushed to their house,” he told the Guardian.
He found two men standing over the burning bodies of Reham and Saad Dawabsheh. “There were two masked men, one of them was standing by Reham looking at her, and the second was standing next to Saad, checking if they were alive or not.”
Ibrahim could hear Ahmad crying inside the house, but ran back to his own home when the intruders spotted him, fearing for the safety of his family. “The settlers tried to follow me back to my house, but they left after my brother came.”
Ibrahim returned to his neighbours’ house. “I went to find Ahmad, I used my cellphone as a light at the doorway to the bedroom. I could hear him but I couldn’t see him. I eventually pulled him out.”
The four-year-old’s legs were badly burned but he was alive. Ali was still inside the house. “I put a cloth over my nose so that I could try to breathe, but the entire room was engulfed in flames and I couldn’t go in to rescue him,” recalled Ibrahim, in tears.
Reham and Saad were carried into a neighbour’s courtyard, with bedding fabric melted into their flesh. “Reham was naked, apart from the bed cover stuck to her back, my father ripped the cover off her and threw it outside,” said Haneen Dawabsheh, 30, a cousin.
Reham’s lower legs had been pierced with glass after the fluorescent lights on the ceiling exploded. Trails of blood were still visible across the courtyard and inside their kitchen.
“I was holding her hand. The ambulance driver told me to keep talking to her so she didn’t lose consciousness,” said Haneen. “I asked Reham what had happened and she said someone threw a burning bottle through the window.”
The couple were taken from Duma, travelling in a hatchback car with the glass smashed out of the boot to allow them to lie flat, to nearby Zatara junction where an ambulance took them to hospital in Nablus.
According to Haneen, Reham did not know Ali had burned to death as she and her husband lay on the ground outside. “I had to lie to her and tell her both her sons Ali and Ahmad were with us. I wanted to raise her spirits so she didn’t give up. Then she asked me about her face and hair which were badly burned. I told her it wasn’t bad.”
Meanwhile, the Palestinian fire brigade retrieved Ali’s body, which they said was burned beyond recognition. Reham, Saad and Ahmad were transferred by the Israeli military to a hospital near Tel Aviv. Both adults had third degree burns over 80-90% of their bodies while Ahmad had burns over 60% of his.
In a statement, Netanyahu said: “I am shocked over this reprehensible and horrific act. This is an act of terrorism in every respect. The state of Israel takes a strong line against terrorism regardless of who the perpetrators are.”
He later visited the Dawabsheh family in hospital. “When you stand next to the bed of this small child, and his infant brother had been so brutally murdered, we’re shocked, we’re outraged ... There is zero tolerance for terrorism wherever it comes from, whatever side of the fence it comes from, we have to fight it and fight it together,” he said, adding that he had spoken with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.
Abbas described the attack as a “war crime” and said it would form part of the Palestinians’ case against Israel at the International Criminal Court.
The UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Nickolay Mladenov, said he was “outraged” by the attack. “This heinous murder was carried out for a political objective. We must not permit such acts to allow hate and violence to bring more personal tragedies and to bury any prospect of peace. This reinforces the need for an immediate resolution of the conflict and an end to the occupation.”
A spokesperson for the EU condemned the “cold-blooded killing” of the Palestinian infant and called for “zero tolerance for settler violence”.
The Israeli army said it was searching for the perpetrators of the attack. “This attack against civilians is nothing short of a barbaric act of terrorism,” said IDF spokesman Peter Lerner.
By dusk, protests in Nablus were intensifying with Palestinians clashing with Israeli security forces. Earlier, around 2,000 people demonstrated in Hebron and about 1,000 took to the streets in neighbouring Jordan. Israeli police forbade men under the age of 50 from entering Jerusalem’s Old City to pray at the Al-Aqsa mosque. Hamas called for a “day of rage”.
In the northern Gaza Strip one Palestinian man was killed and another wounded by Israeli gunfire after they approaced the border with Israel. Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said Mohammad Al-Masri died of his wounds after being shot near the border fence west of the Beit Lahiya area. Another man was in a moderate condition following the incident, Qudra said.
The arson attack was thought to be a “price tag” revenge action in response to an Israeli move earlier this week to demolish two buildings in the West Bank settlement of Beit El. In recent years, extremist settlers have carried out numerous “price tag” attacks on Palestinians and their property.
The Israeli human rights group B’tselem said extremist settlers were rarely brought to justice for such attacks, creating a climate of “impunity for hate crimes”.