A Three-Month-Old Died at a Military Checkpoint. What Led to It?

Ahmad Zaid was three months old when he stopped breathing. His mother, Yasmine, found him unresponsive and took him to a nearby medical clinic, which called for an ambulance to transfer him to a hospital in Ramallah — a city about 30 minutes away. To get there, the ambulance had to pass through a military gate controlled by Israeli soldiers. The soldiers would not let it through.

Ahmad's father, Maarouf, approached the soldiers himself. "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 witnessed the encounter and later spoke to Al Jazeera.

The soldiers yelled at the family to back away and threatened to shoot. They then fired tear gas and stun grenades, pushing the family further from the gate. The Zaids took a longer route on dirt roads to reach the ambulance. Ahmad was pronounced dead in the ambulance at 3:20pm.

What Happened and What We Know

The gate where this occurred is at Deir Ammar, a refugee camp in the West Bank. It had been closed since late February, when Israel's conflict with Iran escalated. The closure cut off about 18,000 people across three villages from services in the nearby city of Ramallah. What used to be a route that took minutes now required traveling on difficult dirt tracks.

News outlets reported the incident differently. Haaretz, reporting on July 6, described it as a delay in evacuation. Democracy Now, reporting on July 7, and Al Jazeera, reporting on July 9, described it as an outright refusal to open the gate. They also disagreed on Ahmad's age — four months versus three. Al Jazeera's account came from direct interviews with the family and is the most recent version of events.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Ahmad's death on July 6. His father collected his death certificate the same day he had received his birth certificate.

Yasmine Zaid's central request to Al Jazeera was simple: "At least open the gate when someone is sick, when someone is about to die." She was not asking for the gate to reopen permanently — only for an exception in a medical emergency.

The Israeli military has not publicly responded to the specific allegations about tear gas, stun grenades, or refusing to open the gate. This means we do not have the soldiers' account of what happened that day — what their orders were, or what they understood about the emergency in front of them.

The Bigger Picture

Ahmad's death is not a one-time event. The World Health Organization recorded 233 incidents in 2025 across the West Bank involving blocked roads, closed gates, or delayed ambulances — most of them involving some kind of obstruction or outright denial of access to healthcare. The United Nations separately counted at least 925 movement obstacles in the West Bank: permanent checkpoints, temporary barriers, gates, earth mounds, roadblocks. These obstacles affect about 3.4 million Palestinians.

A single closed gate seems like a small thing until you consider this: the movement restrictions in the West Bank exist on a scale that touches millions of people. Some gates and checkpoints are permanent. Others are controlled by local military commanders, who may decide on any given day whether to open or close them. This is part of why incidents like Ahmad's occur repeatedly without a single clear explanation from Israeli authorities.

When we look at the patterns the WHO and UN have documented, Ahmad's death reflects a wider problem that will likely continue. The question of what protocols soldiers should follow — whether to open gates for medical emergencies, for instance — is one that may recur at Deir Ammar and other checkpoints for a long time to come.