A four‑month‑old Palestinian infant, Ahmad Ma’rouf Zeid, died on Sunday evening after Israeli occupation soldiers blocked his family and the ambulance transporting him at a military roadblock installed at the entrance of Deir Ammar, west of Ramallah, delaying his access to urgent medical care for more than an hour.
Local sources said the soldiers stopped the ambulance carrying the infant and refused to allow it to pass.
The family was forced to remove Ahmad from the first ambulance and transfer him to another vehicle on the opposite side of the military roadblock.
His condition deteriorated rapidly, and he lost consciousness as the ambulance sped toward the hospital.
Family members said the infant opened his eyes “two or three times” during the transfer before collapsing completely.
“The doctors tried their best to revive him, but he was gone,” a relative said, adding that the ordeal — from the moment the soldiers stopped the ambulance until the hospital declared his death — lasted nearly four hours.
Eyewitnesses reported that Israeli soldiers fired tear‑gas canisters at Palestinians who rushed to help the family near the military roadblock, forcing residents and vehicles to leave the area.
Governor of Ramallah and al‑Bireh, Laila Ghannam, said doctors at the Arab Specialized Hospital declared the infant dead shortly after arrival. She said the family had been trying to rush him for treatment as his condition worsened, but soldiers ignored the emergency and refused to let them pass.
Ghannam described the incident as a “stain on humanity,” noting that Ahmad — the only male child in his family, born after years of waiting — was deprived of his right to life and medical care.
She said the obstruction of ambulances and patients at military roadblocks, gates, and closures is part of a systematic Israeli policy restricting Palestinian movement across the occupied West Bank.
She added that the killing of Palestinian children — whether by attacks carried out by illegal paramilitary Israeli colonizers, direct military gunfire, or by denying them access to medical treatment and leaving them to die at military roadblocks — exposes the true nature of the occupation, which continues to target Palestinian childhood in full view of a world that remains silent whenever the victim is Palestinian.
