In Beit Ummar, the village that buried Falah Abu Maria last week, people think Israeli soldiers are cowards. And that’s the most lenient assessment being heard in the mourners’ tent.

As Falah’s children said, not two hours after a soldier had shot their father, they were hearing on the radio that one of them had tried to strangle a soldier and that the others, including their father, had thrown “boulders” at the troops.

To believe this official army version of events, we must erase the beginning: A group of soldiers armed to the teeth invaded the town and woke the family’s 17 members from their sleep. If the army’s statement reflects the soldiers’ perception of reality — that they indeed felt threatened by the sleepy Palestinians in their pajamas and clogs — it’s easy to see why the Palestinians view them as cowards.

Based on that brief official statement, it’s easy to conclude that the soldiers’ lives were in danger, and that this justified the outcome. One brother was seriously wounded by the soldiers’ fire, another suffered injuries after being beaten with a rifle, and the father was killed. The official statements (and their parrots in the media) skip over the most important details — for instance, the order of events. After all, the soldiers first shot the brother, Mohammed, in the building’s narrow stairwell, in front of his father’s shocked eyes.

Let’s assume for a moment that the family wasn’t telling the truth and that one of them did manage to choke a helmeted soldier. Hello, Israel Defense Forces, don’t you teach your soldiers any karate? Is opening fire the only thing they know how to do to escape an ostensible chokehold? Or was the shot fired at 24-year-old Mohammed a kind of field punishment, given that he was at least one meter from the soldiers?

No one from the family was arrested. And since the IDF has never had any qualms about arresting a wanted man who was wounded, or one of his brothers, some people in Beit Ummar say they’re convinced the soldiers deliberately set out to kill someone. It was hard to listen to this conclusion. And it was even harder to hear how the soldiers had killed the family patriarch.

According to military sources, Falah Abu Maria “participated in throwing boulders and concrete blocks at the forces as they were leaving the village.” Abu Maria was standing on his balcony. No boulders grow there. He apparently did throw something at the soldiers, because after they shot his son, eyewitnesses said, they lost their cool and ran out to the courtyard in confusion.

It’s reasonable to assume the father threw something at them deliberately. Out of anger? Out of despair? Out of hope the soldiers would leave so an ambulance could take his son to the hospital? He apparently threw a potted plant and a broken tile. Even if he threw three plants and several tiles, not a single soldier was wounded. After all, to justify the shooting, the IDF Spokesman’s Office would have been happy to report that a soldier had suffered a scratch.

And behold, when the father, frantic with worry, called for help and perhaps even cursed the people who had shot his son, or cried out, heaven forbid, that God is great, at that moment, despite the hail of “boulders and concrete blocks” falling on the soldiers, one of them apparently found the time, position and coolheadedness to aim his rifle precisely and shoot the carpenter Falah Abu Maria right in the chest. He was 53 when he died.