At the center of this otherwise idyllic Palestinian village, soot still blackens the entryway of a house where an arson attack this past summer by extremist Israelis took the lives of Saed and Reham Dawabshe and one of their two sons, Ali, an infant.
Months have gone by without any indictments by Israel for the murders, and emotions in Duma continue to smoulder.
“How do you expect me to feel when the killer of my son and grandchild is walking freely?” says Mohammed Dawabshe, as he dabbed at tears in a sitting parlor just a few feet away from the home. “Had the opposite happened, Duma would have been destroyed by the Israelis” to locate the perpetrators.
The three Dawabshe family victims instantly became a symbol of Palestinian helplessness in the face of a terror campaign by vigilante Israelis. Israel’s failure to prosecute the case so far has fanned a sense of insult and inequality before the law that has been a backdrop of a subsequent wave of Palestinian riots, stabbings, and shootings.