How a Closed Military Gate Led to a Baby's Death in the West Bank

Three-month-old Ahmad Zaid died on a dirt road while his family tried to reach a hospital, unable to pass through a military gate that Israeli soldiers had closed to the route. According to reporting by Al Jazeera on July 9, Ahmad's mother, Yasmine Zaid, found him unresponsive and rushed him to a nearby medical center. An ambulance was called to transfer him to a hospital in Ramallah, but the direct route ran through the closed gate. Soldiers stationed there would not let it pass.

Ahmad's father, Maarouf Zaid, approached the soldiers directly with a plea. "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 recounted the exchange to Al Jazeera. Soldiers yelled at the family to back away and threatened to shoot. They then fired tear gas and stun grenades, forcing the family to retreat. The Zaids took dirt roads to reach the waiting ambulance instead. Ahmad was pronounced dead en route to the hospital at 3:20 p.m.

According to Democracy Now, the Palestinian Red Crescent had dispatched an ambulance to the camp entrance. Haaretz described the incident differently, calling it a delay in evacuation rather than an outright refusal, citing the Red Crescent's account. The outlets also reported Ahmad's age differently — three versus four months — reflecting variations in their reporting. Al Jazeera's July 9 account, based on direct interviews with the family, is the most recent version of events available.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Ahmad's death, reported by the official Palestinian news agency WAFA on July 6. On the same day he received his son's death certificate in Ramallah, Maarouf Zaid had previously collected Ahmad's birth certificate.

Residents told Al Jazeera that the Deir Ammar gate has been closed indefinitely since Israel's war with Iran began in late February. This closure has cut off roughly 18,000 people across three villages from services in Ramallah. The gate once sat on a routine access road; now it forces anyone needing urgent care to navigate a maze of dirt tracks — a journey of minutes turned into a serious obstacle.

A Larger Pattern

Ahmad's death is not a single incident. The World Health Organization documented 233 cases in 2025 where healthcare facilities, workers, and ambulances across the occupied West Bank were obstructed or denied access. The United Nations has separately recorded at least 925 Israeli movement obstacles across the territory — things like permanent checkpoints, temporary barriers, gates, earth mounds, and roadblocks — that affect roughly 3.4 million Palestinians.

These numbers put what happened at Deir Ammar in perspective. A single gate, closed since February as part of the wider regional war, exists within a much larger system of movement restrictions. That system predates this closure and extends far beyond it. Whether a particular gate is manned, locked, or open on any given day often comes down to local military discretion rather than fixed policy. This is partly why similar incidents show up regularly in WHO and UN reports without a single consistent explanation from Israeli authorities.

Yasmine Zaid's request to Al Jazeera captures what the family was asking for in the simplest terms: "At least open the gate when someone is sick, when someone is about to die." She was not demanding that the gate stay open permanently. She was asking for an exception in a medical emergency — a distinction that suggests the family accepted the closure itself, only objecting to how it was applied when a life was at stake.

The Israeli military has not released a public response to the specific claims about tear gas, stun grenades, or refusal to open the gate. This means the soldiers' account remains absent from the record — details about what orders they were following or what information they had about the medical emergency in front of them stay unknown. Given how many similar incidents the WHO logged in a single year, the question of what soldiers are supposed to do when a medical emergency meets a closed military gate is likely to come up again, at Deir Ammar and elsewhere, long after this case drops from the headlines.

The broader question here is whether current protocols for handling medical emergencies at checkpoints are adequate. At minimum, incidents like this one suggest the need for clearer standing orders — understood ahead of time, not improvised in the moment — about when and how barriers are opened for people in life-threatening situations. Without such clarity, individual soldiers make calls on the spot that can carry fatal consequences. That pattern, repeated across hundreds of documented cases, points to a structural problem in how access is managed, regardless of the intent behind any single decision.