🩸 IDF Executes Two Surrendered Palestinians in West Bank — Israel Calls Them Heroes and Promotes Their Commander
Two men with their hands up, crawling as ordered, are shot dead on video. The minister in charge hugs the killers and hands out promotions.
In the video I embedded above, you will watch two Palestinian men in Jenin (in the West Bank) do everything you are told you should do if you want to live.
They walk out of a building with their hands raised.
They lift their shirts to show they have no weapons.
They are ordered by Israeli forces to turn around and crawl back.
And as they obey, they are shot and killed at point-blank range.
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What the Video Shows — and What Israel Did With It
The two men in the footage have names:
Al-Muntasir Billah Abdullah and Youssef Asasa.
This happened in Jenin, in the occupied West Bank. According to the reporting, they came out of a building during an Israeli raid. They raised their hands. They lifted their shirts. They showed they were unarmed. Then, under orders, they turned around and crawled back toward the building.
They did not charge.
They did not reach for a weapon.
They complied.
And they were shot and killed anyway.
If you only saw that video, you might think: surely this will be a scandal in Israel. Surely someone will be suspended, arrested, charged. Surely there will be a reckoning.
Instead, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s openly fascist National Security Minister, did the opposite.
He said the forces “acted exactly as expected of them – terrorists must die.”
He went to their base, called them “heroic fighters,” and announced the promotion of their commander.
Haaretz ran the headline: “Ben-Gvir promotes officer whose soldiers shot dead surrendered Palestinians.” That’s not a rumor. That’s the policy.
Etan Nechin, an Israeli journalist, put it perfectly:
Ben-Gvir is making the job impossible for those claiming executing surrendered combatants is just a few bad seeds and we should “wait for an investigation.”
From Shireen Abu Akleh to more than 20k dead children to daily West Bank killings, this violence is the norm.
When the minister in charge of your border police watches a clear execution of surrendering men and responds by hugging the unit and promoting the commander, you lose the right to talk about “bad apples.”
This is the tree.
This Is Not New. It’s Just on Video.
The only reason we are talking about this case is because it was captured on camera and broadcast to the world. Israeli rights groups have been warning for years that this is not an exception. It is a pattern.
There is a long list of names and incidents that echo Jenin:
Hind Rajab, 6 years old, killed in Gaza in January 2024 after spending hours on the phone begging for help while trapped in a car surrounded by her dead family. The ambulance team sent to rescue her was killed too.
A March 2024 video from Gaza showing two unarmed men shot even as one repeatedly tried to signal his surrender.
Mohammed Habali (2018), a mentally disabled man shot in the back of the head while walking away from soldiers in Tulkarem.
Eyad al-Halaq (2020), an autistic man headed to his special-needs school in occupied East Jerusalem, killed by police who claimed they thought he was a terrorist.
Three Israeli captives who escaped in Gaza in December 2023 and walked toward IDF troops waving a white flag — and were shot dead anyway.
If this is how they treat their own captives in Gaza, what do you think the rules are for Palestinians?
Israeli groups like Yesh Din and B’Tselem have been documenting this for over a decade. The UN’s Committee Against Torture just wrote that it is “alarmed” by evidence of a “de facto State policy of organized and widespread torture and ill-treatment” of Palestinians, intensified since October 7th.
This is the backdrop for the Jenin video. Not a freak incident. A window into a system.
Impunity Is the Policy
Let’s talk receipts.
Between 2018 and 2022, according to Yesh Din, the Israeli army received 862 complaints about soldiers committing offenses against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
Only 258 of those complaints even became criminal investigations.
Only 13 investigations led to indictments, involving 29 soldiers.
Just one of those indictments involved killing a Palestinian.
That means that roughly 1.5% of complaints led to prosecution. For fatal cases, the number is even worse: one indictment out of 219 deaths brought to the army’s attention — about 0.4%.
And those numbers only include the complaints that ever made it onto someone’s desk.
In other words: if you are an Israeli soldier or a settler who harms a Palestinian, the system has made you a promise. Nothing will happen to you.
That promise is how you get to a place where two men can crawl away with their hands up and be shot dead on video — and the political response is not shame, but a promotion ceremony.
What International Law Actually Says
Let’s be crystal clear here.
Under the Geneva Conventions and the basic laws of war, when a person is surrendering — hands up, no weapon, clearly trying to comply — they are what’s called hors de combat. That means they are out of the fight.
You cannot legally target them.
You cannot shoot them “just in case.”
You are required to detain them, not execute them.
What happened in Jenin is not a gray area. It is what every decent military lawyer in the world will tell you is a war crime: the summary execution of surrendered persons.
And when a government minister responds by praising the shooters and promoting their commander, that minister isn’t just giving his opinion. He is endorsing and encouraging war crimes as policy.
That’s not me being dramatic. That’s literally what this is.
“No One Cares”
Inside Israel, people who try to challenge this culture are isolated and attacked.
Aida Touma-Suleiman, a Palestinian member of the Knesset, says that when she tried to introduce a bill to criminalize torture, a government minister basically admitted Israel uses torture and needs to keep doing it — and then attacked her for trying to “tie the state’s hands.”
Israeli rights organizations submitted evidence to the UN of Palestinians being:
Treated in hospitals while shackled and blindfolded,
Deliberately starved,
Forced to wear diapers instead of being allowed to use toilets.
Israel denied it all, as it always does.
Shai Parnes from B’Tselem put it bluntly: a country cannot carry out a genocide without a large part of its society either supporting it or being indifferent to it. Decades of apartheid, separation, and dehumanization have made it possible for most Israelis to look at the Jenin video, at Hind Rajab, at the 70,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, and feel nothing.
Or worse — to cheer.
Ben-Gvir is not some wild exception. He is the face of that indifference weaponized into policy.
“But They Were Terrorists, Shaun…”
I can already hear the line from the defenders:
“They were terrorists. They didn’t really surrender. You can’t trust the video. You don’t know what they did before.”
Here’s what I know:
Even if they were wanted men — even if they were guilty of everything the army will eventually accuse them of — the second they raised their hands, lifted their shirts, and complied with orders, they moved into a different legal category. Under any serious interpretation of international law, you detain them. You do not shoot them crawling away.
If Israel had real evidence, it would not wait. It would blast their alleged crimes across every channel, leak their “terrorist files” to every friendly journalist, and use it to justify the killings. Instead, we get vague labels and a minister saying “terrorists must die.”
Even Israeli officials and rights groups admit this has been happening for years — to children, to disabled people, to their own captives. Jenin is not an anomaly. It’s just one of the rare times when the mask slipped on camera.
If you still believe Israel is “the most moral army in the world” after watching that video and reading those numbers, it is because you want to believe it, not because the evidence supports it.
Our Responsibility
Family, I know this is heavy. I know some of you are exhausted. I am too.
But I also know this: genocides are not just carried out with bombs and bullets. They are carried out with silence. With people looking away from videos like the one in Jenin because they don’t want to re-open the wound. With politicians hiding behind words like “investigation” and “complex situation” while knowing damn well nobody is going to prison for this.
We cannot control what Ben-Gvir does. We cannot make the army suddenly find its conscience. But we can refuse to let this become just another clip that disappears into the feed.
We can name it for what it is: a war crime, committed in broad daylight, rewarded at the highest level, in a system built on apartheid and impunity.
And we can insist that the politicians and governments who keep arming, funding, and defending this state are complicitin that crime.
If my work helps you name these things more clearly, if it gives you language to push back in your own conversations, I’m asking you to help me keep doing it. Please click here to become a member so we can keep this work free for the world, especially for the people who are living this nightmare and cannot pay for it. And if you’re in a position to help us build something stronger and more permanent, please click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member.
Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun
Don’t Stop Here…
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As I travel back from Atlanta after being with my own mother in the hospital, I just want to thank you for your patience with me and with this work over these past few days. My wife and I are now at the age where our mothers are much more fragile than they used to be.
Read them. Talk about them with your people. Forward this post to three people who still call this a “complicated conflict” instead of what it is.
Because until we face the truth about executions like Jenin — and the system that rewards them — there will be more names, more videos, and more families burying their sons for raising their hands and doing what they were told.
This isn't Gaza. Those men aren't Hamas. No hostages are being held. And these 2 men are clearly murdered in cold blood. And their killers have been celebrated.
The IDF’s depravity knows no limits.