“The settlers killed my son, they kidnapped him and killed him,” his father, Hussein Saed Abu Khdeir, told TIME after returning from Jerusalem’s main police station. Then, protesters threw stones at police officers, who responded by firing sound bombs, tear gas and rubber bullets. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement urging both sides “not to take the law into your own hands” and promising to “uncover quickly who is behind this despicable murder and what motivated it.” A relative of one of the Jewish Israeli teens, Naftali Fraenkel, who also held U.S. citizenship, was quoted as saying “If a young Arab man was murdered for nationalistic reasons then it is a horrifying and disgusting act. There is a blood debt with the two Palestinians who murdered them...the IDF and the Shabak must hunt them, not wild groups who operate outside public life." At the political level, Palestinian leaders leaped at the opportunity to turn the tables on Israel, which used the teens’ disappearance as a pretense to arrest more than 400 West Bank activists, most of them with the militant Islamist group Hamas that Netanyahu blames for the teens’ deaths. In another development, Hussein Abu Khdair said he was held by police for eight hours and put under pressure to say his son's killing was unlikely to be an attack to avenge the deaths of the Israeli youths. Speculation is swirling that the Palestinian teen was kidnapped and murdered in retribution for the killings of three Israeli teens, whose bodies were found on Monday, nearly three weeks after they were abducted in the occupied West Bank. The bodies of the three Jewish seminary students were found near the city of Hebron on Monday, two-and-a-half weeks after they were abducted.
– Mohammed Abu Khudair was heading to morning prayers at 4am yesterday when neighbors saw him forced into a van in east Jerusalem, his father says. They called his cell phone but "my son wasn't answering," his mother adds, per the BBC. An hour later, the Palestinian teen was found dead in an apparent revenge killing, so burned beyond recognition that DNA samples were needed to confirm his identify, father Hussein Abu Khudair tells NBC News, adding, per Time, "The settlers killed my son, they kidnapped him and killed him." More developments: The teen's funeral, originally set for today, has been delayed as authorities perform an autopsy, his father says. Khudair adds he doesn't have faith in the Israeli police "because we're Arab" and says young Jews pulled a 9-year-old boy away from his mother after Mohammed's death. Though he was saved, "he was scratched," Khudair says. "They grabbed him by his neck." Another relative of Mohammed adds "the hatred has increased" instantly in the family's neighborhood. "I've never seen such racism, even in the first and second intifada," he tells the New York Times. "We are entering a very dark time." Meanwhile, police are investigating what could be a third kidnapping after a girl called police from northern Israel. "She said that she was abducted and then the line went dead," an Israeli spokesman tells the Times. "We're searching the area. Helicopters are trying to track. We'll see what's going on there." In response to mortar and rocket attacks from Gaza, "the Israeli Air Force attacked 15 terror sites in Gaza early Thursday," an Israel Defense Forces official notes. "The targets included weapons manufacturing sites as well as training facilities." Some 10 Palestinians were reportedly injured.