It is a scene that seems to come from a different age, yet it unfolds now, in the occupied West Bank. A tiny coffin, draped in white, is lowered into the rocky soil. Behind it, a crowd of mourners does not weep so much as seethe. The dead is an infant, killed in what witnesses describe as military gunfire. Now, the soldiers who pulled the trigger are condemned, not just by the family but by the British government, which has called for an inquiry. But what does such an inquiry hope to find? The facts are rarely in dispute. It is the meaning that divides us.
I stood at the edge of the funeral, watching the faces. There is a particular anguish reserved for the death of a child, a sorrow so raw it strips away the political scaffolding. For a moment, everyone is just a human being. But the moment passes. The flags are raised, the slogans begin. The cycle of grief and anger spins on.
What struck me most was not the rage but the exhaustion. An older woman, her eyes dry, told me she had buried two sons and now a grandchild. She said, “We are used to it. That is the shame.” That is the human cost: a people forced to become accustomed to the unthinkable. And on the other side, young soldiers who will carry this memory for the rest of their lives, a different kind of wound.
The British call for an inquiry is welcome, but it rings hollow to those who have seen such calls disappear into the bureaucratic ether before. What would change? Perhaps the soldiers will be reprimanded, a policy tweaked. But the structures that led to this moment remain. The checkpoints, the settlements, the daily humiliations: these are the slow poison that eventually claims the youngest victims.
This is not a column about who is right or wrong. It is about what happens to a society when the death of a baby becomes a political football. It cheapens us all. The real story is in the silence of the mother, the trembling hands of the father, the small grave that will now define a family’s history. That is the story that needs telling, again and again, until we can no longer look away.
