TEMPLATE -STUDENT NABAHEEN- TEMPEST : SORROW GLOBAL ESSAY

 

AN UNARMED STUDENT TEEN was shot during a cease-fire. Israel was never held to account. 

On the afternoon of his 15th birthday, student Attiya Nabaheen was walking home from his school in Gaza when an Israeli soldier shot him in the neck.

It was November 2014, and Mr. Nabaheen was on his family's land, situated about 500 meters from the militarized Green Line demarcating the Gaza Strip.

In court proceedings, a lawyer representing the Israeli government claimed that Mr. Nabaheen was too close to the fence and didn't heed warning shots before he was hit.

Neither his age nor the fact that he was unarmed stopped the soldier from firing at the student.

The incident left student Nabaheen permanently paralyzed and wheelchair bound for the rest of his life. This all happened during a ceasefire, a time of supposed peace, or status quo, in Gaza.

I'm a human rights lawyer from Haifa, now completing my doctorate studies in the United States.

I also litigate Palestinian civil and political rights cases, and student Nabaheen was my client. I represent him as part of a landmark case that sought civil remedies for his life-changing injuries through the Israel court system.

The case didn't go how we had hoped it would :

It ended with the Israeli Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of a 2012 law under which residents of the Gaza strip are effectively banned from claiming civil remedies against Israeli actions, including unlawful actions with no connection to active situations of armed conflict.

PUT SIMPLY, student Nabaheen's case set a chilling precedent such that no one in Gaza can seek compensation for any damage caused by Israel.

I SAY STUDENT NABAHEEN was my client because last month :

I received word that he, along with 12 of his family members, 10 of them students/children, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on his family's building the day after Hamas's Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

STUDENT NABAHEEN, who was 24 at the time of his death, had survived five major attacks on Gaza. This was the one that finally killed him.

His short life is emblematic of the policies and practices that the Israeli regime imposes on Palestinians in Gaza.

Without a meaningful avenues to make a claim against injustice, Palestinians are effectively without no place to turn. But the people of Gaza, like all people, deserve to enjoy full civil rights, including the right to compensatory damages.

Without those rights, what can we expect them to do with their pain?

The World Students Society, in deep sorrow and anguish, thanks The New York Times and author Rabea Eghbariah.