Eyad al-Hallaq was thirty-two years old and autistic. Every morning, he walked the same route from his home in Wadi al-Joz to the Elwyn al-Quds centre for people with special needs in the Old City of Jerusalem. His teachers described him as gentle, earnest, and deeply attached to routine. He knew the streets by heart.
On the morning of 30 May 2020, Israeli border police officers stationed near the Lions' Gate entrance to the Old City ordered Eyad to stop. According to eyewitness accounts and his teacher Warda Abu Hadid — who was walking with him — Eyad became frightened and ran. The officers opened fire, hitting him multiple times. He collapsed near a rubbish bin in a narrow alley. Abu Hadid screamed at the officers that he was disabled, that he was her student. They shot again.
Eyad died on the stone floor of the Old City, a few hundred metres from his school. He was unarmed. No weapon was found. The police initially claimed they suspected he was carrying a weapon — a claim contradicted by every witness and by the absence of any evidence. His teacher was detained for hours afterward.
The killing drew comparisons to the murder of George Floyd in the United States, which had occurred five days earlier. Protests erupted across Palestine and within Israel. Eyad's mother, Rana, spoke publicly about her son — his love of cooking, his habit of greeting everyone on his walk, the way he carefully arranged his belongings each evening for the next day's journey.
An Israeli investigation was opened. Three years later, in 2023, the border police officer who fired the fatal shots was acquitted of all charges. The court accepted the defence's argument that the officer had acted under a reasonable perception of threat, despite the victim being unarmed and visibly disabled in the company of his carer.
Rana al-Hallaq sat in the courtroom and watched the acquittal in silence. Later, she told reporters: her son's only crime was being Palestinian. The case became a landmark in the documentation of legal impunity — another file in an archive that Palestinian families know too well, where the law offers process but never justice.
