An Israeli border police officer is under investigation after video footage showed him throwing a stun grenade into a car carrying Palestinian youth during a raid on Qalandiya, a refugee camp in the West Bank, according to the Israeli rights group B'Tselem The Guardian.

The video, recorded on Sunday, July 5, shows the officer approaching the vehicle, removing a stun grenade from his belt, and throwing it through an open car door. As the driver tried to get out, the officer pushed the door shut. The device then exploded. The two passengers escaped through the other side of the car, and the officer appeared to fire his rifle as they fled. All three people in the car survived.

Israeli police said the officer's actions did not follow proper procedure. The case has been handed to the justice ministry's Department for the Investigation of Police, which handles misconduct by law enforcement officers. The officer has been suspended while the investigation continues.

Stun grenades are devices designed to produce a loud noise and bright flash to confuse or disorient people. They are meant to be used outside in open spaces, not inside vehicles. Using one in a closed car with people inside breaks the established guidelines for how these devices should be used.

The same raid resulted in the death of a 16-year-old boy named Walid Abu Sneineh and wounded three other Palestinians, including two children. Qalandiya sits between Jerusalem and Ramallah and has been the site of repeated Israeli military operations.

Around the same time, other deaths were reported. Late on July 5, a four-month-old baby, Ahmad Maarouf Zaid, died after his family said Israeli forces prevented them from crossing a checkpoint to reach an ambulance. The family instead drove the infant over rough mountain roads to reach a hospital in Ramallah—a route that delayed care by more than an hour. An Israeli military spokesperson denied that forces blocked the family's crossing. Neither side's account has been independently confirmed.

Just days before, a 15-year-old boy, Amir Ahmad Jaber, was killed during another Israeli military raid in Ramallah.

Since 2020, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed at least 1,175 Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, at least a quarter of them children, according to B'Tselem's count cited by The Guardian. No one has been charged or prosecuted for any of these deaths. This reflects a lack of legal accountability for Israeli security forces in the occupied territory.

Yuli Novak, the head of B'Tselem, said the repeated killing of Palestinian children in the West Bank stems from an Israeli policy that allows killing and violence without punishment, rather than from isolated incidents by individual officers acting on their own.

How this case is understood depends partly on where you stand on the conflict. Israeli authorities are treating the stun grenade incident as a single officer's misconduct—something anomalous that is being disciplined through the police investigation system. B'Tselem and other human rights groups, however, point to the deaths that week—the teenager killed in the same raid, another killed days earlier in Ramallah, and the infant's death connected to checkpoint restrictions—as evidence that disciplining individual officers doesn't address a larger system in which over a thousand Palestinians have died with no prosecutions since 2020.

One concrete way to test whether this case leads to different results will be whether the police investigation results in criminal charges. Based on how similar cases have been handled in the past, rights groups do not expect prosecution, even though the video evidence in this case is clearer than in many other incidents that depend on conflicting eyewitness accounts.