Israeli police have opened an investigation into a border police officer filmed throwing a stun grenade into a car carrying young Palestinians during a raid on the Qalandiya refugee camp, according to CCTV footage released by the Israeli rights group B'Tselem The Guardian.

The footage, dated to Sunday, July 5, shows an officer approaching the vehicle, reaching for his belt, grabbing a stun grenade, and throwing it through the car's open door. As the driver tried to get out, the officer pushed the door shut and shouted, "Shut your mouth. Who are you talking to like that?" moments before the device detonated. The two passengers scrambled out the opposite side; the officer then appeared to fire his rifle as they ducked for cover. B'Tselem said everyone in the car survived.

Israeli police have said the officer acted "not in accordance with procedure" and that the justice ministry's department for the investigation of police officers — the body responsible for probing alleged misconduct by law enforcement, distinct from military prosecutors who handle IDF conduct — is now handling the case. The officer has been suspended pending that inquiry.

Stun grenades, also called flash-bang devices, are designed to produce a disorienting blast of light and sound rather than lethal fragmentation, and are officially classified by Israeli forces as non-lethal or "less-lethal" crowd-control tools. Deploying one inside a closed vehicle occupied by civilians falls well outside published guidelines for their use, which typically call for open-air deployment at a distance sufficient to avoid direct bodily contact or enclosed-space concussive injury.

The stun grenade incident occurred during the same raid in which Israeli forces shot and killed a 16-year-old boy, Walid Abu Sneineh, and wounded three other Palestinians, two of them children struck in the lower limbs. Qalandiya, a refugee camp and checkpoint corridor between Jerusalem and Ramallah, has for years been a recurring flashpoint for Israeli military and border police operations targeting what the IDF describes as militant infrastructure in the camp's dense alleyways.

The raid sits within a broader pattern of fatalities documented over recent days. Late on July 5, a four-month-old Palestinian baby, Ahmad Maarouf Zaid, died after his family said Israeli forces blocked them from crossing a checkpoint to reach a waiting ambulance. The family instead drove the severely ill infant along unpaved, mountainous back roads to reach Ramallah, a detour that delayed treatment by more than an hour. An IDF spokesperson denied that forces blocked the family's crossing. The competing accounts — checkpoint denial versus military denial — remain unresolved, and no independent verification of checkpoint radio logs or crossing footage has been made public.

The previous week, during a separate military raid in Ramallah, forces killed a 15-year-old boy, Amir Ahmad Jaber.

Since 2020, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed at least 1,175 Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank, at least a quarter of them children, according to B'Tselem's tally cited by The Guardian. No one has been charged in connection with any of those deaths — a statistic that speaks to the near-total absence of criminal accountability mechanisms functioning against Israeli security personnel in the territory, notwithstanding the parallel civilian-police investigation opened in this specific case.

Yuli Novak, B'Tselem's executive director, attributed the recurring killing of Palestinian children in the West Bank to what she described as an Israeli policy permitting killing and violent abuse without accountability, rather than to isolated incidents of individual misconduct.

The distinction Novak draws — between rogue conduct and structural policy — is the crux of how this case will likely be read on either side of the debate. Israeli authorities frame the stun-grenade incident as a discrete disciplinary matter, evidenced by the suspension and referral to the police-investigation department, a process that exists precisely to signal that such conduct is anomalous rather than sanctioned. B'Tselem and allied rights groups will point to the surrounding week's toll — a teenager shot dead in the same raid, another slain in Ramallah days earlier, an infant's death entangled in checkpoint access — as evidence that individual disciplinary proceedings, however genuine, sit atop a system that has produced over a thousand civilian deaths with zero prosecutions since 2020.

Whether the department for the investigation of police officers results in charges will be one of the few concrete tests available to observers of whether this raid's fallout differs from that pattern. Given the department's historical rate of indictment in West Bank-related cases, expectations among rights monitors for a prosecutorial outcome remain low, even as the video evidence in this instance is unusually unambiguous compared with contested checkpoint or open-fire incidents that rely on competing witness accounts.