Saad Dawabsha

August 8th, 2015:  Saad Dawabsha, 32, died of burn wounds sustained on July 31st. He was burned to death along with his wife and 18 month old baby, Ali, when right-wing Israelis firebombed his family’s home. His four-year-old son, Ahmad, was the only one to survive the attack – with third degree burns all over his body.

The attack took place at about 2:30 in the morning, in the village of Douma, in the northern part of the West Bank near the city of Nablus.

The Israeli attackers arrived in the dead of night in the village, and began by spray-painting hate slogans against Palestinians on the Dawabsha family home. They then broke a window and threw a firebomb inside, setting off the fire that killed the baby.

The graffiti, written in Hebrew, included the phrase ‘price tag’, which is a slogan used by right-wing Israeli extremists against Palestinians – the reference being that continued Palestinian existence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank would exact a price from the Israeli colonizers.

Ali’s father Sa’ad Dawabsha, and his mother Reham, 37, were also burned to death. Ali’s older brother, Ahmad, four years of age, suffered third degree burns all over his body but survived the attack.

In May 2020, nearly five years after the attack, one of the Israeli attackers was convicted of murder. The other attackers were not convicted, and still walk free.

Israel’s Lod District Court convicted Israeli settler, Amiram Ben-Uliel for his involvement in the arson attack that resulted in the death of 18-month-old Ali Dawabsha.

Ben-Uliel was involved in the 2015  attack that killed Ali Dawabsha and severely burned his older brother Ahmad and both his parents, Reham and Sa’ad when the settler, with others, threw flaming Molotov cocktails into the family bedroom. Reham and Saad later died of their wounds.

The Dawabsha family was from Douma village near Nablus. Source: IMEMC