I saw Awdah's text in the morning of July 28. He said that settlers are in his village, Umm Al Khair, and they are trying to cut the main water pipe. "If they cut [it] the community here will literally be without any drop of water," he wrote in his text. Accompanying it was a picture showing settlers armed with rifles, a banal sight.

He often sent updates like these from his Palestinian village in the West Bank to activists and his friends across the world. He would inform us of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) raids, arrests, and demolitions. Or that settlers, who typically came from the flourishing settlement of Carmel next door, were harassing and attacking residents. Over time, I found myself running out of ways to respond meaningfully to such updates, especially as now I was far away in the U.S. I would reply, "This is terrible" or "Stay strong," and each time I felt helpless and thought that my responses were useless.

I did not get the chance to respond to his text that morning. A few hours later, Awdah Hathaleen was dead, shot by a settler.

The lives of Palestinians are extremely precarious. I grasped the gravity of this fact during my time in Israel-Palestine, but subconsciously, I made myself forget it: Awdah and his community faced injustices and violence all the time, but simply because he was my friend, I never thought that he would die.

The heartbreak from this single death, in other words, puts into perspective how the scale of atrocity in Palestine is truly unfathomable.

When I first met Awdah, he was describing life under the Israeli occupation to our group, which was mostly comprised of Jews from the U.S. who were visiting Umm Al Khair. He shared in vivid detail his first sighting of a demolition by the IDF when he was in the fourth grade—how he ran from school, stood shivering in the cold, and watched multiple homes being reduced to rubble, his relatives screaming and weeping. He explained how his uncle Haj Suleiman was run over and killed with a vehicle by the IDF in 2022. The Haj, an elderly man at the time, was a revered figure of nonviolent resistance and a community leader, and thousands came to his funeral. As Awdah spoke that night, the settlement of Carmel was visible behind him, and a mural commemorating the Haj was on the left.

Over time, I noticed that Awdah had unlimited energy to share his stories and political vision with visitors. I also felt that in these conversations, his childhood trauma from the demolition and the recent loss of his uncle always surfaced in one way or another, like wounds that would not heal.

That first night, Awdah shared something that he would say often, "To survive under the occupation, you need two things: patience and hope." Patience because justice would be very slow, and hope because without it, "There is no light." We were sitting on a small basketball court, where perhaps only football was ever played. Awdah would eventually be killed right there.

Alaa Hathaleen, Awdah's cousin, mourns at the spot where Awdah was shot by the settler Yinon Levi in Umm Al Khair, the Occupied West Bank, on July 29, 2025. (Photo: Oren Ziv)

Although Awdah introduced himself as an English teacher and an activist, I also saw in........

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