were safely at school.
“She woke up around 6.45am as usual and made breakfast and left the house, it was a normal day,” said Maliha of her daughter.
Hadeel’s aunt, Menal 42, even blames the school for not notifying their family earlier about the girls’ absence.
“I don’t know how they got to Jerusalem, I was told Qalandiya was closed,” she said, referring to the main check point through which Palestinians in the West Bank must pass to reach the city.
Menal shows The National Hadeel’s diary, she flicks through the pages and pauses at a picture of a young man.
Hadeel had cut out the picture of her brother Mahmud Awwad, 22, from a martyr’s poster. He was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper near Qalandiya during clashes between protesters and security forces.
He died after five months in hospital on November 28, 2013 — nearly two years ago to the day. This date is circled and repeated in Hadeel’s diary. The family have pursued legal recourse for his death in Israeli courts but to no avail.
The shooting of the Awwad girls comes after nearly eight weeks of violence between Israelis and Palestinians in which more than 90 Palestinians have been killed along with 15 Israelis.
More than half of the Palestinian fatalities were accused of carrying out attacks, mostly acting alone and at random, armed with knives. Many others were killed by live fire during protests.
“The video of the Awwad cousins shows an execution of girls carrying scissors that could have been easily neutralised by Israel’s security apparatus, which is armed to the teeth,” said Husam Zomlot, Ambassador at large for Palestine.
“The cold-blooded murder of mostly children and teens can’t be explained from a security perspective or basic rules of engagement.” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas alongside a raft of human right organisations has accused Israel of carrying out “extrajudicial killings” of Palestinians.
He said the current wave of attacks was the “inevitable result of diminishing hopes, the continued strangulation” and lack of sense of security felt by our people.
A UN report this month called for “independent, thorough, prompt and impartial investigations into all suspected cases of extrajudicial, arbitrary and summary executions and to prove compensation to the victims and their families”.
“Cases of excessive use of force by Israeli forces against Palestinians, including some which appear to amount to summary executions, continue to be reported and some have been captured on video,” said Christof Heyns, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial killing.