[2] According to Deborah Sontag of the New York Times, the murder became a "potent Israeli symbol as an innocent victim of the raging violence.

"[3] At 4:00 pm on 26 March 2001, Shalhevet was shot in her stroller while accompanied by her parents from a parking lot by Hebron's Avraham Avinu neighborhood, where the family lived.

[2][14] A spokesperson for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said: The fact that they could pick off the baby and then the father makes this a hideous, deliberate, cold-blooded murder.

[2] In the verdict the judges expressed their shock of the brutality of the murder:It was enough for one bullet, fired from a sniper rifle, to end the life of the infant Shalhevet Pass, who up to that event was unknown to the wide public, and just lived her life as all other children, until one day as the evening came she was hit in her head, and she died, and Shalhevet whom was still small and in her infant stage, was sentenced to death by a vile killer whom intentionally, using a Telescopic sight, pulled the trigger.

We must not accept this image and we need to do everything we can to condemn it.Yitzchak Pass, the child's father, later joined the Bat Ayin Underground terrorist group which planned to blow up a Palestinian girls' school in East Jerusalem.

[15] The Associated Press ran the story with the headline "Jewish toddler dies in West Bank",[16] and was criticized by Joshua Levy in his book The Agony of the Promised Land for downplaying the murder.