On Sunday 20 September 2026, the eve of Yom Kippur, Netanel Shukrun, a French-Israeli father of six from the community of Alei Zahav, was shot dead at the Ein Raya spring near Neve Tzuf, in Judea and Samaria. He was sitting in his car with his 16-year-old son, Yoav. With his last breath he told the boy to run. Yoav escaped. The father did not.

Forty-eight hours later, from the podium of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, French President Emmanuel Macron addressed the situation in the West Bank. According to the widely circulated English rendering of his remarks, he said: “Look at what is happening in the West Bank, where there are violations every day. In the name of what? Hamas has never struck in the West Bank.”

The original French phrase — « Le Hamas n’a jamais sévi en Cisjordanie » — was variously translated as “never struck,” “never been particularly active,” or “never operated.” The political effect was the same: Israel was placed in the dock; Hamas was all but written out of the West Bank.

Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office answered the same day. The statement, posted in full on X, read:

The grotesque absurdity of Emmanuel Macron’s statement is staggering. On Sunday, the eve of Yom Kippur, just two days ago, Netanel Shukrun—a FRENCH CITIZEN and father of six—was murdered in his car by a Hamas terrorist in Judea and Samaria. With his final breath, he told his son to run. Hamas terrorists carry out attacks against Jews almost every day. They have murdered countless Israeli civilians in Judea and Samaria. Ignorance is NO EXCUSE for erasing their blood.

The facts of the murder

Israeli authorities identified the suspected gunman as Qadri Samara, a resident of Biddu, previously known to security services and described as a Hamas operative. He opened fire from a vehicle on Israelis at the spring. An IDF tracker in the area returned fire and wounded him. Samara was later arrested at a hospital near Ramallah by Duvdevan troops. Hamas praised the attack without issuing a formal claim of having ordered it.

Shukrun, who worked as an information-systems analyst, was buried in Alei Zahav. At the funeral his son thanked him for sixteen years together and for the warning that saved his life. The widow, Meirav, said her husband had managed to alert Yoav in the last seconds.

These details were reported by JTA, The Jewish Chronicle, Ynet, The Times of Israel and others. They were already public when Macron spoke.

A clarification that came too late

After the Israeli reaction, a French diplomatic source told Israeli media that the president had been “misinterpreted” and that he had meant Hamas “does not govern” the West Bank — a different claim from the one heard in the hall. The Palestinian Authority, not Hamas, administers parts of the territory. That distinction does not erase Hamas’s long record of attacks, recruitment and incitement in Judea and Samaria, nor the affiliation of the man accused of killing a French citizen two days earlier.

Hamas does not rule Ramallah. It does kill Jews there.

Why this matters beyond Paris and Jerusalem

For Jewish communities in Europe — including Portugal — the episode is familiar. A dual national is murdered; the crime is documented; a European capital then speaks as if the organisation responsible were a distant abstraction. France recognised a Palestinian state and has spent two years tightening the diplomatic vice on Israel. None of that required denying, from the most visible podium in the world, that Hamas sheds blood west of the Jordan.

Portuguese Jews know the cost of official language that prefers a formula to a body. The Inquisition also had its vocabulary. It did not make the dead less dead.

The subject here is simple. A Frenchman was murdered in the West Bank, in front of his son, by a Hamas-affiliated terrorist. The President of France then told the United Nations that Hamas had never struck there. Jerusalem answered with the name of the victim. The facts have not changed.

As long as European diplomacy prefers the circus of UN to the victims’ list, it will remain loud, irrelevant, and deaf to a father telling his son to run. What remains to be deplored is a diplomacy of the foutriquet — the word Michel Onfray took from Jules Vallès and applied to Macron: the small man of large gestures, who says one thing and its opposite, and who, at the UN, preferred a formula to a French father’s last breath. (Onfray explains the name in Causeur; Onfray to Sud Radio: “duplicity and imposture”)