He loved to play basketball with his friends. He dreamed of studying business administration to help his family’s stores. He enjoyed taking care of his younger siblings and was “very polite, very respectful, very intelligent,” according to his mosque’s president. Then, suddenly, a bullet to his head ended everything.

A Palestinian-American teenager was killed by a barrage of gunfire in the occupied West Bank on Friday. The U.S. State Department confirmed the killing without naming the victim, but the teenager’s family identified him as Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, 17. The Israeli police said on Saturday that they were investigating the killing.

Tawfic was born to Palestinian parents and was raised in the suburbs of New Orleans. His grandfather had come to America “looking for the American dream,” said Sherean Murad, the assistant principal at the Muslim Academy in Gretna, who taught Tawfic civics when he was in the 11th grade.

Tawfic and his family had moved to the West Bank temporarily in May to connect with relatives — he hoped to improve his Arabic while he was there and planned to return to the United States for college.

News of his death left friends and relatives in Louisiana in disbelief.

“We are livid as a community, because it’s so senseless,” Ms. Murad said.