On July 28, 2026, exactly one year after a Palestinian man was shot and killed in the West Bank, a Palestinian rights group called Al-Haq released a detailed investigation naming the person they say pulled the trigger. The report concludes that an Israeli settler named Yinon Levi fired the bullet that killed Awdah Muhammad Khalil Hathaleen in the village of Umm al-Khair. The West Bank is a territory that Israel has occupied since 1967, where Palestinians live under Israeli military rule and where Israeli settlers have built communities on land the international community considers Palestinian. The report, titled "The Killing of Awdah Hathaleen: Beyond a Settler Crime," draws on dozens of videos and photographs, cross-referenced legal testimony, and geospatial and open-source analysis to reconstruct the events of July 28, 2025 (Al Jazeera).

Awdah Hathaleen, 31, was a Palestinian activist and father of three. Al-Haq describes him as a "Palestinian human rights defender" (Al-Haq). He had previously helped with production on the Oscar-winning documentary "No Other Land," which chronicles life in Masafer Yatta under Israeli occupation pressure. Women in Umm al-Khair launched a hunger strike to demand the return of his body, which Israeli authorities withheld for ten days before releasing it for burial (Al Jazeera).

According to the investigation, the events of July 28, 2025 began when Yinon Levi and other Israelis brought excavators to flatten land, aiming to establish a new settlement outpost. Settlement outposts are Israeli communities built in the West Bank without formal approval from the Israeli government. Workers moved onto privately owned land belonging to Umm al-Khair residents, provoking a confrontation. Minutes before the shooting, a second settler named Rony Avraham struck Hathaleen's cousin, Ahmad Hathaleen, in the head with an excavator's hydraulic hammer. Witnesses told investigators that Levi himself struck several residents, including two women, before raising his weapon (Al Jazeera).

Al-Haq's evidence established that none of the Palestinians at the scene was armed and that Hathaleen posed no danger when the trigger was pulled. The autopsy, published by B'Tselem on July 31, 2025, found that a single 9mm bullet to the chest caused fatal bleeding. The one-centimeter defect on the body matched the nine-millimeter handgun Levi was carrying, an Israeli-manufactured firearm commonly used by Israeli settlers (Al Jazeera; B'Tselem).

What followed the shooting deepens the picture. Israeli settlers blocked the access road to Umm al-Khair, preventing an ambulance from reaching Hathaleen while Israeli soldiers and police looked on. Levi was not arrested at the scene. Instead, he was filmed standing with Israeli forces, pointing out Palestinians and international activists who were subsequently arrested. Following international outcry, Levi was detained, but an Israeli court released him and placed him under house arrest for three days (Al Jazeera).

Levi runs Meitarim Farm, an illegal settlement outpost in the Southern Hebron Hills. He draws manpower from Hashomer Yosh, an Israeli group that funnels volunteers into outposts like his, sustaining the infrastructure of land encroachment that brought the excavators to Umm al-Khair's privately owned land in the first place (Al Jazeera).

The broader context here is the near-total absence of accountability for settler violence in the occupied West Bank, a pattern extensively documented by both Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations. B'Tselem published its own video investigation on August 10, 2025, featuring testimony from Ikhlas al-Hathaleen, 43, a mother of five and Awdah's sister-in-law, who described the killing to the Israeli organization (B'Tselem). The Al-Haq report goes further than establishing who pulled the trigger; it maps the network of outposts, volunteer pipelines, and the documented failure of Israeli security forces to intervene, arrest, or facilitate medical access.

A remembrance event was held on July 28, 2026, at Kehilla Community Synagogue in the San Francisco Bay Area, marking the one-year anniversary of Hathaleen's death (KQED). The full Al-Haq report is published at alhaq.org.

What the Al-Haq investigation lays bare is not a single act of violence but an entire system in which legal, military, and settler infrastructures work together to displace Palestinian communities from their land while shielding perpetrators from consequence. The report combines geospatial analysis, autopsy findings, and cross-referenced witness testimony, leaving little ambiguity about who fired the fatal shot. The harder question, one the report implicitly poses, is whether the international community has any tool capable of addressing the systemic impunity that allowed Yinon Levi to walk away from a killing, point out witnesses for arrest, and return to his outpost.