The taxi to Bethlehem was delayed, and Jihad stood at the dusty taxi stand and waited. He was on his way to the Open University in Bethlehem, to register for the upcoming school year. His father says that he hadn't decided what he wanted to study. Maybe that's what he was thinking about while he stood at the stand, exposed to the burning sun.

And what was going through the heads of the soldiers who beat him mercilessly, with a club, with the butt of a rifle and with kicks to his head, so that he died? Is it possible that he tried to attack them with a knife, even though two eyewitnesses didn't see it? Even if he did, why did the soldiers continue to beat him, even after he lay on the ground, unconscious and perhaps bound as well, as an eyewitness told us? And what kind of monstrous behavior is it to handcuff the bereaved father, and then leave him on the ground, in front of the body of his beaten and dying son? Above all, why did the Israel Defense Forces rush to dismiss this grave incident, "after an initial investigation," during which nobody interrogated the eyewitnesses, with the conclusion, "the soldiers acted properly"?

Pictures of Jihad Shaar's death flicker on the computer screen: The battered and calm face of a young man with three holes in his skull, in front and in back. Also a picture of the bereaved father, Khalil, a worker in a Bethlehem factory that manufactures olive-wood souvenirs, his hands bound behind his back, kneeling on the floor, his face radiating restrained pain and humiliation, and the soldier standing next to him with a drawn weapon - everything is documented on the computer screen. The stone houses stand at the edge of the desert, in the village of Tekoa, on a mountainside opposite the archaeological site of Herodion and the Jewish settlement also called Tekoa. The area is usually quiet, with the exception of the annoying IDF patrols.