An Arab infant was killed in a playground in Israel. Now his whole village lives in fear

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Toys are still strewn about the living room of Ammar Hujayrat’s home in Bir al-Maksur, and his bicycle stands outside just as he left it. The drawings he made in preschool are also just where he left them last Thursday, on his bed.

He spent his last moments of life with his aunt and three cousins at his town’s new playground. He was on the seesaw when he heard the gunshots.

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All the children ran, but Ammar didn’t manage to get far enough. A bullet hit him in the neck, fatally wounding him. His mother Aisha, who was home at the time, ran to the playground and saw her 3-year-old son wallowing in his own blood on the grass, surrounded by his panicked relatives.

Ammar’s father, Mohammed, said he had just gotten home when he “heard shouting – ‘Ammar’s dead, Ammar’s dead!’ I rushed out of the house, frightened and confused. ‘Why should Ammar be dead?’ I asked. ‘What did he do?'”

When he arrived at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, where Ammar was taken, the boy was already dead. “I hugged him and didn’t want them to take him away from me,” Mohammed said. “That was our final hug, and I didn’t want it to end.”

3-year-old Ammar Hujayrat

The day his son was killed, Mohammed went to a relative’s funeral. Ammar begged to come with him. “I told him that at his age, it’s not good to be at funerals. I refused his request, and he was disappointed and said he was mad at me. That was the last thing he said to me.”

Despite the Arab community’s soaring crime rates, Mohammed said he wasn’t prepared to lose his young son to a stray bullet. “I never expected this to enter my home, much less in this way,” he said. “What, ultimately, did Ammar want? Just to play on the playground like any boy.”

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“But our silence will evidently bring more disasters down upon us,” he added. By “our,” he meant the entire Arab community.

At a condolence call to the family Saturday night, Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai urged “the entire community to repudiate those people who possess illegal weapons … Pulling the trigger has become the easiest thing in the world, and we have to uproot this from among us – Jews and Arabs, it doesn’t matter right now.”

Abed al-Rahman Hujayrat, Mohammed’s uncle, said it was vital to cooperate with all the relevant agencies to fight crime and get illegal guns off the streets. “The police must strike the criminals with an iron fist,” he said.

Ammar Hujayrat’s mother and sisters in their home this last week Rami Shllush

“The ease with which one can open fire in the street is inconceivable,” he added. “We have to use all our resources – mayors, Knesset members, the police, everyone – to prevent such disasters.”

Many Arab families, he charged, have failed in educating their sons. “It all begins with the family and ends there. The police and the establishment bear responsibility, but what about our own culture? We have to inspect our own homes, and at the same time pressure the relevant agencies to end this crime.”

Bir al-Maksur, located east of Shfaram, is considered a peaceful place relative to other Arab towns. But there’s almost no Arab town that hasn’t suffered from the rampant crime. And two days after Ammar’s death, residents said that fear still fills the air.

“I’m considering not sending my children to preschool tomorrow,” said Samer Hujayrat, who has a child in the same preschool Ammar attended. “What can guarantee that something like this won’t happen again?

“If our children have started being murdered in playgrounds, what place is safe?” he continued. “Nobody in the Arab community feels safe today. It will take a long time to get back to normal after this incident.”

Ahmed Alsheikh, another Bir al-Maksur resident, agreed. “We’re all scared now,” he said. “There’s never been an incident like this in this village. It will evidently take time for peace to be restored to us – if ever.”

The town’s mayor, Khaled Hujayrat, said “the guns have started to threaten all of us, even in our own homes. Right now, there’s fear that organized crime rings will enter the village, that they might slip in from neighboring villages. We still have no concrete proof about this case, but what happened proves that something’s not right.”

The playground in which Ammar Hujayrat was killed by a stray bullet Rami Shllush

“Many young men today want easy money,” he added. “They want to be involved in the protection racket, drugs, arms dealing; they don’t want to work. They set up a gang, and the worst thing is that many young men see criminals as a model to emulate. And apparently this is starting to happen among young men in our village, too. “

The city council has already prepared plans for how to work with the town’s teens, he said, and when school resumes, “we’ll talk about Ammar’s case in all the schools.”

Aisha Hujayrat still hasn’t digested her son’s death. “I still hope Ammar will come back,” she said sadly. “We believe in God, but all this is very hard for us.

“Who will smile at me every morning? Who will laugh with me? Who will jump on the blankets and the sofas? Ammar was the blithe spirit in this house. Why did they take him from us?”