Nathan Thrall is the author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (Metropolitan, 2023), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, Time, The Economist, The New Republic and the Financial Times, and selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. His previous book, The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine, was published by Metropolitan in 2017. His essays, reviews and reported features have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College in New York. Originally from California, he lives in Jerusalem.
The presence of Israeli troops stationed outside the school seemed designed to provoke the students so that they could then arrest as many of them as possible.