‘Shoot me, just let my son pass’: The last moments of Ahmad Zaid 

Deir Ammar refugee camp, occupied West Bank – Sunday morning began with the kind of small milestones families cherish in Deir Ammar refugee camp, northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

That morning, three-month-old Ahmad Zaid drank more milk than usual, while his father, Maarouf Zaid, picked up his birth certificate in Ramallah. The family was preparing for Ahmad’s first outing: A day trip to Jericho with his sisters and cousins the following day.

By afternoon, those ordinary moments had turned into a race against time to save Ahmad’s life.

His mother, Yasmine Zaid, found Ahmad unresponsive and rushed him to a nearby medical centre, where staff began efforts to revive him as an ambulance was called to transfer him to a hospital in Ramallah.

However, a locked Israeli gate on the road between Deir Ammar and Ramallah blocked the ambulance’s route. The plan was to drive Ahmad to the gate, where medical staff would carry him across on foot with his oxygen mask and transfer him to the waiting ambulance just a few steps away.

But the plan collapsed when they found Israeli soldiers stationed there. Maarouf, returning from Ramallah, pleaded with them to let his critically ill infant pass, but they refused to open the gate, and the family were blocked from crossing on foot.

“They yelled at us to get back,” Maarouf’s sister-in-law, Fatima al-Abd Khalil, told Al Jazeera.

“They were angry and said they would shoot us. When they saw the boy, they paused. Then they became more violent.”

In a desperate attempt to save his son, Maarouf carried Ahmad towards the soldiers, his oxygen mask slipping off, and pleaded with them to let him pass.

“My son is going to die. Shoot me, just let my son pass,” Khalil said about Maarouf.

Soldiers responded by firing tear gas and stun grenades, forcing the family to retreat to their car. They were forced to turn around and drive along long and winding dirt roads to reach the ambulance.

By the time Ahmad was in the ambulance at 3:20pm, it was too late. He was pronounced dead en route to the hospital.

On the same day Maarouf received Ahmad’s birth certificate, he went to collect his son’s death certificate from Ramallah.

Residents say the Deir Ammar military gate was closed indefinitely after Israel’s war with Iran began in late February, isolating roughly 18,000 people across three villages from Ramallah’s services. For families here, the closure has become part of everyday life.

“At least open the gate when someone is sick, when someone is about to die,” Yasmine said.

Khalil said Ahmad’s death is part of a wider reality faced by Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

“This is not the first, and it won’t be the last time something like this happens,” she said. “Every day, there is a patient who needs to go to the hospital. This is our life.”

The World Health Organization documented 233 incidents affecting healthcare facilities, workers, and ambulances across the occupied West Bank in 2025 alone, with the majority involving obstruction and denial of access rather than direct assault.

Across the West Bank, at least 925 Israeli movement obstacles have been recorded by the UN, affecting 3.4 million Palestinians: Permanent checkpoints, temporary barriers, gates at the entrances of Palestinian communities, and physical blocks like earth mounds and roadblocks.

Most obstacles operate without a fixed schedule: At a checkpoint, passage depends on which soldiers are there and for how long; at a locked gate, it depends on whether anyone comes to open it at all.

“At any point, a soldier can decide to close the entrance [to a village], cutting entire communities off from the surrounding areas,” Salah al-Khawaja, director of the Central West Bank Department at the Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, told Al Jazeera.

The problem extends beyond individual roadblocks to a wider system of movement restrictions, built around illegal Israeli settlement expansion.

“The gates are part of a complete system,” al-Khawaja says, describing bypass roads built to connect expanding Israeli settlements while circling Palestinian towns entirely, so that the same roads that expand access for settlers are the ones cutting off Palestinian communities from each other.

Al-Khawaja argues that the network’s primary purpose is not security but the isolation and fragmentation of Palestinian towns and villages. For families living behind these barriers, the consequences can become most severe during medical emergencies, when delays in reaching care can have life-threatening consequences.

In Ahmad’s case, the Israeli restrictions continued even after his death. His family said Israeli military authorities later contacted them by phone with instructions for his funeral, including bans on political slogans, martyr posters and public displays, warning that there would be consequences if those orders were not followed.

The only flag present at the funeral was the one wrapped around his coffin.

Ahmad was his parents’ only son, born after three daughters, aged 11, 10 and 3, following years of trying for a boy. Ahmad’s mother, Yasmine, had undergone three rounds of failed fertility treatment before he was born.

“The boy came after nine years, after I had the girls,” she said.

Maarouf had not eaten or drunk water since his son’s death and was struggling to accept that Ahmad was gone.

“We are all going crazy now,” his aunt, Senyora Zaid, said from next to Ahmad’s grave. “He tells me: I want to go get my son. I want to bring him back from the grave.”