Why a victim’s sexuality mattered in a Palestinian murder case : NPR

Note: This story contains graphic descriptions of violence.

HEBRON, West Bank — Around sunset on Oct. 5, 2022, two 24-year-old men drank tea on a terrace overlooking the hills of their ancient holy city. The evening ended with one of them decapitated and the other under arrest.

Palestinian law enforcement officers in Hebron, the largest Palestinian city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, say they have witnessed many crime scenes, but never one with a severed head. The city’s historical core — a militarized zone with Palestinians, Israeli settlers and the tomb of the patriarch Abraham, revered by them both — has seen some of the ugliest violence and injustices of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but that was not this story.

Images of the crime scene quickly spread on social media, as did the suspect’s last name. A mall and butcher shop belonging to the suspect’s extended family were vandalized. “A horrific crime,” read one Palestinian news headline. The Palestinian police called it a “new type of crime to be seen in the Palestinian areas.” A Palestinian talk show asked the victim’s cousin what happened. “This thing,” he said, “cannot be discussed in the media.”

In Israel, news of the murder was reported very differently. “Kidnapped to the Palestinian Authority territories and murdered because of his sexual orientation,” read one Israeli report. “A bloody reminder of the LGBTQ situation in the Palestinian Authority,” read another.

Ahmad Abu Markhiya was among a rare group of Palestinians from the West Bank granted the temporary right to live in Israel: those deemed to face threats to their lives because they are gay.

His gruesome murder received international attention and then faded from headlines. During the Gaza war, it has come to light again. Pro-Israel campaigns have cited his killing as an example of Palestinian savagery. Pro-Palestinian advocates say Israel weaponizes gay rights to distract from its actions in Gaza.

A photo of Ahmad Abu Markhiya is displayed on a relative’s phone.

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A one-and-a-half-year NPR investigation into the life and murder of Abu Markhiya — drawing from police files, court documents and more than 40 interviews in Israel and the West Bank — reveals a far more complex web of circumstances surrounding the killing than has previously been reported.

This is the story of a man in search of home, caught between two societies that never fully granted him one. For some, his murder was to be weighed against the shame he caused in life. For others, his murder robbed him of the chance to extricate himself from a society that refused him dignity and freedom.

Our investigation traces the victim’s escape from the West Bank to Israel, probes the mystery of what drew him back and identifies his accused killer for the first time. It also explores the parallel justice systems — official and traditional — that have examined his murder but have yet to resolve it.

Two years — and one war — later, justice remains deferred for Ahmad Abu Markhiya.

Part 1: The advocates

It was the spring of 2021, a year and a half before his murder, when Abu Markhiya sent a Facebook message asking for help.

Rita Petrenko answered it. At the time, she ran The Different House, an Israeli nonprofit organization advocating on behalf of LGBTQ+ Palestinians seeking safety in Israel. Homosexuality is largely shunned in Palestinian society. Palestinians contacted her to say they were fleeing life-threatening persecution from their families, and she helped them secure official papers to stay in Israel.

Abu Markhiya told her he had been on the run from city to city in the West Bank for more than a year, ever since his uncle caught him being intimate with another young man, and men in his family beat him. (His family denies it threatened him.)

He told Petrenko he fled to the streets of Hebron, then to the West Bank cities of Beitunia, Ramallah and Tulkarem, as men in his family pursued him. He told her a relative opened fire on his car, so he took the risk of slipping through Israel’s network of concrete walls, wire fences and military checkpoints — built after a wave of Palestinian bombings in Israel two decades ago and designed to control Palestinian entry into Israel. Then he slept in a Tel Aviv parking lot for two weeks.

A view of central Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, on Feb. 11.

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In a previous life in her native Russia, Petrenko worked for the police, training dogs to detect clues at crime scenes, so she considered herself a good lie detector. She believed there were some Palestinians who pretended to be gay to seek asylum abroad — and others who were indeed gay and fabricated threats from their family to gain access to Israel and live a freer life. But Abu Markhiya’s story struck her as credible. It didn’t seem likely he would suffer weeks on the streets to back up a false story. “That’s not a life worth making something up for,” she said.

Palestinians and Israelis who knew him say there was no doubt he was gay.

Petrenko submitted Abu Markhiya’s testimony to the Israeli defense unit that grants Palestinians permits, and officers summoned him to an interview at a military facility. They concluded that sending him back to the West Bank would put him at risk.

But Israel would not grant him permanent asylum as a Palestinian. Historically, Israel has granted non-Jews asylum only in rare cases. It is especially opposed to an influx of Palestinians. But over the years, Israel has taken in Palestinians who spied for Israeli security agencies and needed cover, and in the last few years, it has granted protection to a couple of hundred Palestinians facing threats to their lives in the West Bank because of their gender or sexuality.

Israel granted Abu Markhiya a temporary residency permit, on condition that he apply for resettlement abroad through the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. On June 1, 2021, Petrenko applied to the UNHCR on Abu Markhiya’s behalf. She hoped Canada or Australia would accept him, as they had taken in Palestinian LGBTQ+ asylum-seekers in exceptional cases. But other categories of Palestinians seemed to be given priority, she said, like people with academic degrees and women facing immediate threats to their lives. (The UNHCR said it does not comment on individual resettlement requests.)

Ofir Zweigenbom (left) and Maiyan Price Zohar worked closely with Ahmad Abu Markhiya as volunteer counselors at an at-risk-youth shelter in Tel Aviv, Israel.

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While Abu Markhiya waited for an answer, he lived in at-risk-youth shelters and worked restaurant jobs illegally. At the time, Israel would not grant LGBTQ+ Palestinians work permits or health care. Given their tenuous status, many gay Palestinian asylum-seekers were coerced by their circumstances into sex work. Israeli welfare programs offered them — including Abu Markhiya — housing and rehabilitation programs to escape sexual exploitation, said Asma Alssaad, one of his shelter counselors.

In Israel, Abu Markhiya chose the nickname Esso. Alssaad said it was Arabic for Esau, the grandson of Abraham in Islamic and Jewish tradition. “Many young Palestinians who escape to Israel choose an alias for themselves. It serves the purpose of dividing between the life they used to have in the West Bank and the life they have in Israel. Of course, it’s also for reasons of confidentiality,” Alssaad said.

Israeli shelter volunteers said Abu Markhiya was more mature than other young residents. He was clean-shaven and well-groomed, and he kept his locker organized.

He had plans for his future.

“To rent a house with a friend. To be loved,” said Maiyan Price Zohar, 28, his primary Israeli counselor at the shelter. “He wanted to live.”

In the summer of 2022, an Israeli Supreme Court petition by human rights groups prompted Israel to grant work rights and health care to LGBTQ+ Palestinians with Israeli permits. By then, Abu Markhiya had been in Israel for a year. Israeli defense officials renewed his permit but sought answers from the UNHCR: How much longer would it take to resettle him abroad?

In late August 2022, Petrenko asked the UNHCR to expedite Abu Markhiya’s request for resettlement. Out of all the Palestinians she represented, he had waited the longest. He was receiving threatening calls and was eager to move abroad.

Weeks later, Abu Markhiya was dead.

A street in Hebron in the occupied West Bank. The men pictured are unrelated to the people featured in this story.

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The day after his murder, his community of gay Palestinian asylum-seekers and their Israeli advocates held a small memorial ceremony in Tel Aviv. They lit candles arrayed to spell out his name, Ahmad, in Hebrew.

His counselors and friends at the shelter were distraught: How did he disappear from Israel to the Palestinian city of Hebron? They were certain he would have never gone willingly to the same city where he was under threat.

Many were convinced he was kidnapped or lured there, and all were convinced his killing was an anti-gay attack. But the Israeli police did not contact them to seek their testimony. They heard no word about any formal investigation, nor did they expect to. His Israeli counselors didn’t think Israeli police would care about a murder of a Palestinian in the Palestinian territories, and they didn’t think Palestinian police would bother to investigate the murder of a gay man.

“It’s a black hole,” said Ofir Zweigenbom, one of Abu Markhiya’s Israeli counselors.

In the twilight zone between Abu Markhiya’s conditional life in Israel and gruesome death in the West Bank, they thought there would never be answers.

Part 2: The prosecutor

What his supporters in Israel did not know was that the chief Palestinian prosecutor of Hebron was pressing charges against the suspected murderer.

In a gleaming new limestone courthouse funded by the Canadian government, Nashat Ayoush sat at a large desk dressed in a white shirt and tie, in front of framed photos of the late Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat and the current leader, Mahmoud Abbas.

Ayoush had spent his entire career in the Palestinian state prosecutor’s office, part of the civil justice system set up in the 1990s, as Palestinians built the institutions they hoped would eventually form the core of a country independent from Israel.

He collected all the details of Abu Markhiya’s murder — witness testimony, the autopsy and a photo of the 24-year-old defendant taken shortly after his arrest — in an orange file folder held together by a black cord, Criminal File 2725/2022.

Nashat Ayoush served as the chief prosecutor in Hebron before being reassigned to another position. He led the Abu Markhiya murder investigation and pressed charges against the defendant. “We caught him red-handed,” Ayoush says.

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The evening of the murder, according to a copy of the indictment obtained by NPR, a family of four heard a commotion outside the old stone house they were renting in Hebron. “When they looked out of their window, a few meters from the crime scene, they saw the suspect stabbing the victim with a knife in his neck and then dragging him,” the indictment says.

They called their landlord, Mohammed Abu Eisheh, a respected dentist who lived in a stately house next door. He rushed home from his dental clinic downtown and alerted police, who arrived moments later. They found a young man standing under an oak tree next to a decapitated body. “Upon seeing the police, he attempted to flee but was arrested, his hands and clothes stained with blood,” the indictment says.

It was the dentist’s son, Anas Abu Eisheh. The crime took place in his backyard. “We caught him red-handed,” Ayoush said.

A trail of blood ran from a storage room attached to the stone house, where the victim was killed, to the side of a hill under the oak tree some 20 yards away, where Anas Abu Eisheh had dragged the body and tried to hide it, according to the indictment.

The cause of death, according to the autopsy report reviewed by NPR, was 10 stab wounds to the chest and lower neck. Only after he died had he been beheaded.

“It was a shock for us,” Ayoush said.

As news reports spread about a gay Palestinian murder case in Hebron, officials from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights raised the case with Ayoush, and a U.S. diplomat inquired with the Palestinian Authority’s attorney general. The Palestinian Authority has long been scrutinized for lax prosecution of family violence against women and girls. A gruesome anti-LGBTQ+ killing would be a stain on the Palestinian leadership, which was reliant on international support.

“We explained to them that our investigations did not indicate any link between his being gay and the murder,” Ayoush said. In fact, Ayoush said, the question of the victim’s sexuality never came up in the Palestinian police interrogations, despite all the press reports alleging Abu Markhiya had faced anti-gay threats in the West Bank. Homosexuality is taboo in the West Bank’s traditional Palestinian society, but it is not outlawed, he told us repeatedly.

Documented anti-gay killings are rare in the West Bank. LGBTQ+ advocates say some killings are framed as accidents. Others are shrouded in accusations of treason. Six months after Abu Markhiya’s murder, a 23-year-old Palestinian was killed by militants who accused him of spying for Israel. In a purported confession video, he claimed Israeli agents blackmailed him with video footage of him having sex with another man.

In 2014, an anonymous group of former Israeli intelligence officers said they were instructed to extort gay Palestinians to spy for Israel or be exposed.

In 2019, after years of quiet activism, the Palestinian queer group alQaws staged a public demonstration in Haifa, a city in Israel with a large progressive Arab community, to protest the stabbing of a gay teenage Palestinian citizen of Israel. Weeks later, Palestinian police banned the queer group from holding events in the West Bank, saying it violated Palestinian values.

The courthouse in Hebron where a defendant is being tried for the murder of Ahmad Abu Markhiya.

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The Palestinian activist community saw this public struggle as progress; there were other countries in the region that had no queer organizing at all.

But then the community faced a setback in the months before Abu Markhiya’s murder. Vigilantes in the West Bank attacked a venue hosting an openly gay Palestinian singer and disrupted a march perceived to be associated with the gay community. Palestinian police failed to prosecute the suspects. The Palestinian LGBTQ+ activist community has maintained a low profile ever since. No queer organization in the West Bank issued a statement about Abu Markhiya’s murder.

The chairman of the Palestinian Psychiatric Association, Dr. Tawfiq Salman, has counseled West Bank families whose children have come out as gay in recent years. “I’m convincing the families how to accept their sons, their daughters, as they are,” he said. “They have to deal without violence.” He said one client said he was moving his family to the U.S. to protect his gay son from repercussions from his community.

In our conversations with Abu Eisheh, he did not deny his son Anas, a law student at Hebron University, killed Abu Markhiya. But he said the killing had nothing to do with homosexuality. He said that his son, a longtime friend of Abu Markhiya, was mentally ill — and that Abu Markhiya was to blame.

A few years prior, he said, Abu Markhiya had given Anas drugs, which he claimed induced schizophrenia that his son was treated for with antipsychotics. Abu Eisheh said his son began engaging in violent outbursts against his family. He believes on the day of the murder, Abu Markhiya gave his son an illegal substance that interacted with his medicines, triggering a psychotic episode that resulted in the gruesome crime. His son told investigators he had no recollection of the killing.

NPR was unable to verify that Anas was being treated for mental illness at the time of the crime. Abu Eisheh provided two psychiatric reports citing his son’s aggressive behavior and religious delusions about resembling an Islamic messianic figure, but one document was dated three years before the killing and the other, written at the request of the family, was dated three days after the murder.

Mohammed Abu Eisheh, a dentist whose son Anas has been charged with the murder of Ahmad Abu Markhiya, poses for a photo in his home. After Israeli media reported that Abu Markhiya was gay, Abu Eisheh says, public opinion in Hebron “flipped from being against Anas to being with Anas. The pressure let up on us a lot, as a family.”

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Salman, the psychiatric association chairman, said some Palestinian murder suspects’ families claim mental illness to protect the family’s reputation and prevent revenge killings. Ayoush, the Hebron prosecutor, said the suspect’s motive in this murder case was irrelevant.

“We have sufficient proof against him. … We are not obliged by Palestinian law to search for the motive,” Ayoush said. He said he was treating the case like any other. That was the essence of justice he was hoping to prove the Palestinian government would be able to pursue.

On March 29, 2023, the Palestinian public prosecutor charged Anas Abu Eisheh with premeditated murder. The prosecutor said it was a crime punishable by life imprisonment.

NPR attended a hearing at the Hebron First Instance Court on Sept. 6, 2023, five months into the proceedings. The courtroom was covered in sleek wooden paneling, and the judge sat high atop a raised bench. The mood was tense: Guards were spread throughout the room, separating the defendant’s brother and the victim’s cousin.

Abu Eisheh, handcuffed and flanked by more guards, was ushered into the defendant’s glass cage. He stood tall and appeared attentive but showed no emotion. In a raised voice, the counsel for the prosecution read the charge against him.

Earlier that year, the defendant had been transferred from detention in Hebron to a Bethlehem psychiatric hospital for an examination. The judge had requested a psychiatric evaluation as to whether the defendant was aware of his actions at the time of the crime. The judge read aloud the hospital’s response: It was inconclusive. The judge ordered the hospital to conduct a repeat psychiatric evaluation, and court was adjourned.

Outside the walls of the courthouse, a different kind of justice was being pursued.

Part 3: The justice systems

Sheikh Walid Tawil sat in his downtown Hebron office wearing a brown shawl with gold embroidered trim, a red-and-white-checked keffiyeh headscarf and a thick gold and silver watch. In his hands he held a chunky chain of shiny wooden prayer beads. He is a member of the Tawil tribe, one of 176 tribes or family clans present in Hebron. The 52-year-old sheikh leads an ultrareligious Islamic life — four wives, 20 children — and is a central figure in a parallel justice system of community reconciliation called sulh.

The tradition, practiced since before the creation of modern Palestinian criminal courts, centers on the asha’er, the family clans that play powerful roles in Palestinian society. Crimes between individuals become disputes between families. The goal is to prevent retaliation, assign responsibility, restore civil peace and reintroduce the offending family back into society.

Four days after Abu Markhiya’s murder, Tawil presided over a large mediation ceremony as the representative of the defendant’s family. Another sheikh, Fayez Al-Rajabi, represented the victim’s family.

Sheikh Walid Tawil is representing the family of the defendant in a parallel Palestinian justice system of community reconciliation.

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The two men brokered the traditional one-year atwa — a written admission of guilt and a truce to prevent a blood feud between the families. The defendant’s family paid the victim’s family the standard compensation of 100,000 Jordanian dinars, the equivalent of about $141,000 — a sum pegged to the currency of Jordan, which ruled the West Bank before Israel occupied it. The two families agreed to hold negotiations to determine whether the victim’s family was owed any more money, in order to reach a final reconciliation before the truce expired a year later on Oct. 9, 2023.

Unlike the Palestinian civil justice system, which played down the question of homosexuality in this murder case, the traditional system appeared to place it front and center.

“Gays have no rights in society, religion or family,” Tawil told us. The Quran condemns sex between men, according to traditional readings of the text, and some sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad prescribe the death penalty for it, but Islamic scholars have debated the topic for centuries.

Tawil was not suggesting that Abu Markhiya was killed because of his sexuality. But proving that he was gay would be a mitigating circumstance for the perpetrator. It could compel the victim’s family to drop any further demands for financial compensation and to reach a final resolution.

“We are an Islamic society in Hebron,” the sheikh said. “If the victim has a bad reputation, the reconciliation fee is less.”

Both Palestinian justice systems, official and traditional, seek to avoid strife between family clans. A compromise between the families is preferable. Whatever the families decide in the traditional arbitration process affects the sentencing in the official criminal case. With a homicide, a family reconciliation agreement can reduce a prison sentence by a third, according to Ayoush, the prosecutor.

The first time we met, Abu Eisheh, the defendant’s father, welcomed us into his dental clinic in downtown Hebron. He sat behind his desk wearing blue scrubs. The wall next to him was covered in diplomas and certificates.

He did not condone the murder. But it was a family feud to resolve, and rumors about the victim’s sexuality gave the defendant’s family the advantage.

Buildings in an Israeli settlement stand above a Palestinian street in the old city of Hebron in the occupied West Bank in February.

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“When the event took place, everyone denounced it and were very upset with the event, with Anas,” his father said.

That changed when the Israeli media reported that Abu Markhiya was a gay asylum-seeker.

“The Israeli media provided us with a free service and broadcasted videos and broadcasted reports that the boy was gay. Within 24 hours … the entire public opinion flipped from being against Anas to being with Anas. The pressure let up on us a lot, as a family,” Abu Eisheh said.

He let out a small laugh.

“If we prove that Ahmad is gay, the problem will resolve more easily,” Abu Eisheh explained. He said the victim’s family “will try to finish the issue quickly because this would be considered a shame for the family.”

On the outskirts of Hebron, on the side of a scraggly mound and up a set of exposed concrete steps, is the small home of Awatef Abu Markhiya, Ahmad Abu Markhiya’s mother. His father died some years ago, and she remarried. She has the same angular jaw and almond-shaped eyes as her late son.

Her family advised her not to speak about her son’s murder. Whatever she said could prejudice the reconciliation negotiations.

“Ahmad had a very, very good heart,” she said. She cried, describing a beloved son, and repeatedly denied he was gay.

“We know he was not gay,” Al-Rajabi, the Abu Markhiya family’s arbitrator in the mediation, told us. “We don’t have homosexuality in Hebron. This is Abraham’s city.”

Part 4: The friend

Why did Abu Markhiya return to the city he had fled?

“I know the whole story from the beginning to the end,” a man in his early 20s from Hebron told NPR in the summer of 2023.

This young man was both a friend of the victim and a relative of the defendant. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he is also gay and had run away from home after the murder, afraid of being targeted for his sexuality.

He said Abu Markhiya had been haunted by a case of blackmail from the time he fled to Israel until the end of his life.

A view of Route 60, which crosses the West Bank from north to south, in the area of the South Hebron Hills.

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Yahel Gazit/AFP via Getty Images

He said there was a man in Hebron who had pursued Abu Markhiya for sex and threatened to release an intimate photo of him. Abu Markhiya knew the man personally and complained to the police three weeks before fleeing to Israel, and he filed an additional complaint against the alleged blackmailer several months later, according to police records reviewed by NPR.

In a phone interview with NPR, the alleged blackmailer, whom NPR is not naming due to possible repercussions against him given the intense taboos in the West Bank against homosexuality, said he was detained and denied the allegations, and he said that his family convinced Abu Markhiya to withdraw the complaint a few weeks before his murder.

Abu Markhiya arrived in Hebron. His family said that he was there to seek Palestinian health insurance coverage for a work-related injury (at the time, it was still difficult for gay Palestinian asylum-seekers to access Israeli health care) and that he intended to withdraw his police complaint (though the Hebron prosecutor’s office said he did not end up withdrawing it). He told his family he needed to settle his affairs because he planned to move abroad. His advocate in Israel — Rita Petrenko — had asked the U.N. to expedite his resettlement request.

Hours before the murder, the young man said he saw Abu Markhiya: He had gotten a haircut in downtown Hebron. Then he went to meet Abu Eisheh.

Posters showing late Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat and the Fatah political party’s emblem are displayed in Hebron in the occupied West Bank in February.

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The young man said that Abu Eisheh had also been pursuing Abu Markhiya, wanting to be in an intimate relationship together and promising to protect him, but that Abu Markhiya refused.

It remains unclear why the two met that evening and what compelled the killer to murder and behead Abu Markhiya. The accused killer’s family denies that Abu Eisheh is gay or that his relationship to the victim was more than just friendship.

But what compelled Abu Markhiya to return to the city he had escaped appears to have been the hope of tying up loose ends and getting a fresh start.

Part 5: The war

On Oct. 7, 2023, almost exactly one year after Abu Markhiya’s murder, Hamas carried out the deadliest single attack on Israelis in history, and Israel began its deadliest Gaza offensive in history.

In the global debate over the Gaza war, LGBTQ+ rights have taken center stage. Groups like Queers for Palestine have been a fixture at anti-war rallies, accusing Israel of embracing gay rights to “pinkwash” war crimes.

Israel’s advocates have fired back, criticizing queer protesters for condemning Israel rather than Hamas Islamists, who reject gay rights. “Some of these protesters hold up signs proclaiming gays for Gaza,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a joint meeting of U.S. Congress in July. “They might as well hold up signs saying ‘Chickens for KFC.'”

Abu Markhiya’s story has been resurrected in this firestorm by pro-Israel campaigns online. One of them, Queer in Gaza, cites his killing and states: “Protect LGBT Palestinians. Only Israel does.”

During the war, Israel revoked all Palestinians’ permits in Israel, citing security concerns. In a survey of 73 Palestinian LGBTQ+ asylum-seekers, conducted three months into the war by the Association for LGBTQ Equality in Israel, most said they lost their jobs, were assaulted and were arrested. Some said they were also deported to the West Bank. Human rights groups intervened, and Israel reversed the deportations of protected LGBTQ+ Palestinians.

Israeli soldiers take their positions during a military operation in the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank on Nov. 19, 2023.

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The war also brought sweeping Israeli crackdowns to the West Bank, putting the Abu Markhiya murder proceedings into a deep freeze.

About six months had passed since Abu Eisheh was charged with premediated murder for the killing and beheading of Abu Markhiya. Ayoush, the Hebron prosecutor heading up the case, could not reach his own courthouse for a month due to Israeli roadblocks. (He was later reassigned to another role in the justice system and is no longer on the case.) Lawyers were kept waiting hours at Israeli checkpoints when traveling from one city to another. The Palestinian Bar Association went on strike for six months due to the movement restrictions. Neither the accused murderer nor his lawyer appeared at court hearings during that time.

The court proceedings are still dragging on, with no progress a year and a half after they began. Abu Eisheh remains in a Hebron detention center, where he is allowed weekly family visits. Whether due to a high sensitivity around this murder, incompetence, indifference or some other reason, the Bethlehem psychiatric hospital has not heeded repeated court requests to submit an evaluation of the defendant and whether he is fit to stand trial. In May, the director of the hospital told NPR, “We will contact the court soon.”

To this day, it has not submitted its evaluation.

While the official West Bank criminal justice system was paralyzed at the start of the Gaza war, the traditional justice system thrived. Fresh tragedies sidelined older ones, and families resolved pending disputes. The war offered an opportunity to put the Abu Markhiya murder case to rest as well.

The atwa, the truce between the Abu Markhiya and Abu Eisheh families, had expired on Oct. 9, 2023, two days into the war. On Oct. 16, the Abu Eisheh family paid a visit to the Abu Markhiya family home. They asked the victim’s family to reconcile, but the victim’s family demanded more money as compensation for the murder. The two sides agreed to convene a council of city dignitaries to reach a final reconciliation, saq al-sulh, by January 2024.

That committee has never convened.

Sheikh Walid Tawil shows a picture of a memorial to Abu Markhiya by gay Palestinian asylum-seekers and their Israeli advocates in Tel Aviv. “We cannot allow any homosexual person to have any kind of rights in society,” he said.

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Sheikh Tawil, the Abu Eisheh family’s arbitrator, was not concerned. He was confident the Abu Markhiya family would not seek revenge or more money. He was convinced by the documents attesting to the defendant’s mental illness, and he held up his phone to show us Israeli news articles that identified the victim as gay and photos of the memorial candles in Tel Aviv spelling out his name, Ahmad, in Hebrew.

“This of course in our society is completely forbidden. We cannot allow any homosexual person to have any kind of rights in society,” he said.

The arbitrator for the Abu Markhiya family insists the case remains unsettled. But convening a council of city dignitaries would only resurface the central question of the unresolved case — whether Abu Markhiya was gay. Answering that question could risk the family’s reputation by association. It also would weaken the family’s ability to make further claims for accountability for their son’s murder.

By this logic, in Hebron’s communal justice system, the scales are now balanced.

“Ahmad deserves accountability and he deserves dignity,” said Sa’ed Atshan, an associate professor at Swarthmore College and a Palestinian LGBTQ+ human rights advocate who authored a book on queer Palestinians and has been following the murder case. “What a travesty. He was so close to freedom.”

Part 6: The house

One spring evening, several months into the war, Abu Eisheh walked across his rocky backyard to the old stone house where the murder took place. An Israeli warplane rumbled in the sky; Hebron is a short distance from Gaza.

It was sunset, around the same time his son drank tea with Abu Markhiya on the terrace before the stabbing. From there, the young men had looked out onto an expansive view of the hilly city.

On the horizon were the onion domes of Hebron’s Russian Orthodox church, the city’s only surviving church. Thousands of years ago, according to tradition, the patriarch Abraham came to the city and pitched his tent near an oak tree that still stands on the church grounds.

Mohammed Abu Eisheh, whose son Anas Abu Eisheh has been charged with the murder of Ahmad Abu Markhiya, points to a storage room with a white wooden door where prosecutors say the crime took place. The four rows of cinder blocks above the storage room make up the wall of the terrace where the victim and his accused killer drank tea shortly before the murder.

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A much younger oak tree marks the spot where the victim’s head and body were found. He was buried in the center of Hebron, not far from the tomb of Abraham.

Nearly two years have passed since Ahmad Abu Markhiya was killed. His mother, Awatef, still denies he was gay. She still does not know why he was killed or whether the murder case will ever be laid to rest. She prays for justice of a different kind.

“In the end,” she said, “justice comes from God.”