The father of a Palestinian toddler killed in a firebomb attack blamed on Jewish extremists has died of wounds sustained in the fire.

Suspected arsonists torched the home of Saad Dawabsheh in the West Bank village of Duma, killing his 18-month-old child, Ali, in an act Israel’s prime minister described as terrorism.

Dawabsheh’s wife, Reham, and his four-year-old son, Ahmed, were seriously injured in the attack.

A spokeswoman for Israel’s Soroka Medical Centre, which was treating Dawabsheh for third-degree burns, confirmed he died on Saturday.



A postmortem was to be held in Rafidiya hospital in Nablus on Saturday. A Palestinian official said this would provide evidence for a complaint to the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague.

The funeral procession was scheduled to begin in Nablus on Saturday afternoon and make its way to Duma, where Saad Dawabsheh will be buried next to his son.

Ahmed Tibi, a deputy speaker in the Knesset, representing the Arab-Israeli Joint List, said at the funeral that Jewish terrorists had burned 15 houses and yet not one has been arrested.

“Those who support and subsidize the settlement enterprise create a climate in which it is easy for terrorists to continue to burn and kill,” he told mourners. “I turn to President Obama: Next time you consider vetoing a proposal in the UN Security Council to condemn the war crimes of Israel’s occupation, remember the scorched faces of Ali Dawabshe and his father Saad.”

The family’s small brick-and-cement home in Duma was gutted by fire early on 31 July and a Jewish Star of David spray-painted on a wall along with the words “revenge” and “long live the Messiah”. No one directly linked to the arson attack has been apprehended.

The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and his security cabinet have come under growing pressure to crack down on violent far-right Jewish groups since the attack, and the government decided to allow harsher interrogations of suspected Jewish militants with methods once reserved for Palestinian detainees.



It also said it would start detaining citizens suspected of political violence against Palestinians without a trial, another practice previously used only on Palestinian suspects.

Palestinians and Israeli human rights groups say Israeli authorities do little to enforce the law against militant settlers and that the Israeli military has largely failed to protect Palestinians against such attacks.



Many of the attacks have been part of a “price tag” tactic intended to deter the dismantling of unauthorised settlement outposts that have sprung up on West Bank hilltops over the years.

On Monday the Palestinians submitted a request to the ICC to investigate the firebombing and “settler terrorism”.

At a meeting with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, on Wednesday, Arab foreign ministers agreed to call on the United Nations to protect the Palestinians from “terrorist crimes” by Jewish settlers.

Israel this week held an alleged Jewish extremist following the outcry over the attack, who is understood to be Meir Ettinger, grandson of Meir Kahane, a rabbi who founded the anti-Arab movement Kach and was assassinated in 1990 in New York.

Ettinger was arrested in Safed in northern Israel “because of his activities in a Jewish extremist organisation”, a security service spokesman said.

Police said Ettinger, 24, was suspected of “nationalist crimes” but did not accuse him of direct involvement in the firebombing.





