Occupied East Jerusalem — Sixteen years after Ziad’s death, Moira Jilani still waits to hear the footsteps of her husband sound up the stairs of their home in Shu’fat, occupied East Jerusalem. She still lives at her mother-in-law’s building, where she and their three girls used to wait excitedly for Ziad to return home from work. The first thing Moira remembers about Ziad is his laughter.
Not the video that Israeli rights investigators pieced together of his final moments, nor the word “terrorist” that Israeli police attached to him hours after he died. An old Christian friend of Ziad had recently dreamed of him and called to check in on her. Ziad would bring Moira along to the b’nei mitzvahs and weddings of Israelis he knew.
He was just that kind of personality that drew you in,” Moira told Al Jazeera. On the day he was killed, Ziad had promised his daughters he’d take them to the beach once Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque were finished. When I come back, I’ll just honk, and you come on down,” were his last words to his wife.
On June 11, 2010, Ziad Jilani was driving his pick-up truck home through the congested roads of Wadi al-Joz on his way home. According to witnesses who spoke to The Los Angeles Times, Ziad was caught in the middle of a fight between Israeli forces and Palestinian youths throwing stones. A rock struck his windshield, causing him to swerve into a group of police officers, lightly injuring two of them.
A border police officer then opened fire, and as he left his vehicle for safety, he was shot in the back. Minutes later, as he lay on the ground, he was shot two more times in the head at close range by a border police officer. An investigation by Israeli rights lawyers claimed that less than two weeks earlier, the officer who shot Ziad dead, Maxim Vinogradov, had posted online about his desire to kill Arabs, according to Moira.
A case against Vinogradov and his commanding officer was closed due to a lack of evidence. Neither of them has faced trial. Ever since that promised day at the beach, Moira said she and her daughters have had to live with the fallout of Ziad being branded a “terrorist”.
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