Three-month-old Ahmad Zaid died on the road between Deir Ammar refugee camp and Ramallah after Israeli soldiers refused to open a military gate that blocked his family's route to hospital, according to an account published by Al Jazeera on July 9. His mother, Yasmine Zaid, had found the infant unresponsive and rushed him to a nearby medical centre, from which an ambulance was summoned to transfer him to a hospital in Ramallah. The ambulance's path ran through the gate. Soldiers stationed there would not let it pass.

Ahmad's father, Maarouf Zaid, pleaded directly with the soldiers. "My son is going to die. Shoot me, just let my son pass," he said, according to his sister-in-law, Fatima al-Abd Khalil, who spoke to Al Jazeera. Soldiers, she said, yelled at the family to retreat and threatened to shoot them. They fired tear gas and stun grenades, forcing the family back. The Zaids turned around and took dirt roads to reach the waiting ambulance. Ahmad was pronounced dead en route to the hospital at 3:20pm.

The Palestinian Red Crescent had been called and dispatched an ambulance to the entrance of Deir Ammar, according to Democracy Now, which reported the incident on July 7. Haaretz, reporting a day earlier on July 6 under the headline "Four-month-old Dies After IDF Delays Evacuation From West Bank Camp," described the same episode as a delay in evacuation rather than an outright refusal, citing the Red Crescent's account that an ambulance was waiting but soldiers held up its passage. The discrepancy in the infant's stated age — three months versus four — reflects differences between the two outlets' reporting; Al Jazeera's July 9 account, drawing on direct interviews with the family, is the most recently published version of events.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Ahmad's death, reported by the official Palestinian news agency WAFA in an article timestamped July 6 at 03:40. Maarouf Zaid, Al Jazeera reported, went to collect his son's death certificate in Ramallah on the same day he had received Ahmad's birth certificate.

Residents of the area told Al Jazeera that the Deir Ammar gate has been closed indefinitely since Israel's war with Iran began in late February, a closure that has cut off roughly 18,000 people across three villages from services in Ramallah. The gate sits on what had been a routine access road; its indefinite closure converted a matter of minutes into an obstacle course of dirt tracks for anyone needing urgent care.

A Pattern Documented by International Bodies

Ahmad's death is not an isolated data point. The World Health Organization documented 233 incidents in 2025 affecting healthcare facilities, workers, and ambulances across the occupied West Bank, the majority involving obstruction or denial of access. The United Nations has separately catalogued at least 925 Israeli movement obstacles across the territory — permanent checkpoints, temporary barriers, gates, earth mounds, roadblocks — affecting an estimated 3.4 million Palestinians.

These figures give scale to what happened at Deir Ammar. A single gate, closed since February for reasons tied to the wider regional war with Iran, sits within a much larger architecture of movement restriction that predates this specific closure and extends well beyond it. Whether any individual gate is manned, locked, or contested on a given day is often a matter of local military discretion rather than fixed policy, which is part of why incidents like this one recur with such regularity in WHO and UN tallies without a single unifying explanation offered by Israeli authorities.

Yasmine Zaid's words to Al Jazeera frame the demand at the center of this story in the plainest terms available: "At least open the gate when someone is sick, when someone is about to die." It is a request for an exception, not a change in policy — a distinction that matters because it suggests the family was not contesting the closure's existence, only its application in a medical emergency.

The Israeli military has not been quoted in the available reporting responding to the specific allegations of tear gas, stun grenades, or refusal to open the gate for the ambulance. That absence leaves the soldiers' account of the encounter — what orders they were operating under, what they understood about the medical emergency in front of them — unrepresented in the record as it currently stands. Given the volume of similar incidents logged by the WHO in a single year, the question of standing protocol for medical emergencies at closed military gates is one likely to recur, in Deir Ammar and elsewhere, long after this particular case fades from the news cycle.