Sayfollah Musallet. Photo courtesy of Musallet’s family.

Israeli settlers brutalized an American, beating him unconscious and blocking an ambulance from reaching him, according to the victim’s family. The young Palestinian-American was pronounced dead by the time he arrived at a hospital.

Sayfollah Musallet, who was in his 20s, was visiting his family in the Palestinian town of Al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya. Two of his cousins, Fatmah Muhammad and another, granted anonymity due to safety concerns, say he had arrived in June. Born in Florida, Musallat grew up in the town of Port Charlotte.

The Israeli military is reportedly investigating the killing.

The State Department and the Israeli military did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Muhammad, who is not in Palestine but has been in touch with her family since the attack, said that when the settlers approached, Musallat and others reached out for help, but the settlers would not let anyone pass. Even when the ambulance came, the settlers allegedly did not let it go through for two hours. It remains unclear what specific injuries led to Musallat’s death.

Muhammad described Musallat as “one of those kids that everyone loves” with a “beautiful heart,” a “sweet, gentle kid, very genuine,” everyone attests as funny and bright.

In Florida, he helped run a family ice cream shop, a place where his personality shone through, his family members said.

Muhammad and the other family source said that the entire Palestinian town where the family is from is devastated.

“There’s no justice there. You can’t call the police. You can’t call the Israeli government. The murderers just get to walk away,” Muhammad said.

International and local human rights groups have repeatedly sounded the alarm over rising Israeli settler violence across the occupied West Bank. The UN has documented more than 2,000 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians and their property since January 2024. This year, Israeli settlers have injured at least 350 Palestinians. In the first week of July alone, there were at least 27 Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians that resulted in casualties, property damage, or both, according to the UN humanitarian office (OHCA).

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According to Muhammad, other family members have also been recently attacked by Israeli settlers.

Just on Thursday, the family had been preparing to approach US media outlets in the face of increasingly severe settler violence. The family’s appeal described settler attempts to establish illegal outposts on private farmland, and settlers attacking Palestinians and their property.

“We kindly request your support in putting an end to these assaults by the settlers in the area. If possible, we would be honored to receive a visit from your esteemed office for journalists to observe the situation on the ground,” the appeal read.

Musallat is at least the seventh American killed in the West Bank, Gaza, or Lebanon since Oct. 7, 2023, including six killed by Israeli forces. Earlier this week, Zeteo asked several Republican senators if they knew how many Americans had been killed by Israel in the last 21 months. None of them could answer.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with additional details throughout.

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TURMUS AYYA, West Bank — To his family, Amer Rabee was just a 14-year-old American boy picking almonds with two friends.

But to the Israeli soldiers who gunned him down on Sunday night, the trio were “three terrorists” who were “endangering civilians” by throwing rocks at cars. The hail of bullets the soldiers fired over the next several minutes succeeded in “eliminating one terrorist and hitting two additional terrorists,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement Tuesday.

Now, as the village of Turmus Ayya, which has a large number of U.S. citizens, mourns the loss of one of its children — whose family insists had neither violent tendencies nor political allegiances — it’s grappling with a deeper question: why President Donald Trump and the U.S. government have said so little about the killing of one of its citizens.

A recent photo of Amer Rabee. Courtesy Rabee family

Amer was “an American citizen,” Mohammed Rabee, 28, said Thursday about his cousin, who grew up in Saddle Brook, New Jersey. “He thought his passport came with freedom and American protection, but it clearly didn’t.”

“Our president hasn’t shed a light on this,” he added.

Mohammed and other family members spoke to NBC News on the third day of mourning for Amer at one of Turmus Ayya’s municipal buildings, where townspeople shuffled through to offer their condolences, sipped coffee and smoked cigarettes before dining on a lamb and rice lunch.

Describing Amer, the youngest of five siblings, as “very intelligent,” Amer’s father Mohammed Rabee, 48, said he had “no problems” with anyone in the West Bank, where the family moved to in 2013. He added that Amer had plenty of friends back home in the U.S. who he kept in contact with over the phone and through his gaming console.

Relatives mourn over the body of 14-year-old Amer Rabee during his funeral on Monday. John Wessels / AFP – Getty Images

As soon as he heard his son was involved in a shooting, he said he tried to contact the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, hoping it would intervene or provide medical help.

The process of identifying himself and his son took too long, Mohammed said, and he begged the State Department official on the other end of the line to contact the IDF to ask it to hold its fire. NBC News has asked the embassy for comment.

The following day, hours after his son had been killed, the embassy called Mohammed back to follow up, he said.

“I told them he’s already dead, so what can you do now?” Mohammed said.

Mohammed Rabee mourns his son Wednesday in Turmus Ayya. NBC News

The same day, the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem released a statement acknowledging that an American citizen had been killed and offered “our sincerest condolences to the family on their loss.”

But Amer’s family, along with other residents of Turmus Ayya, said they wanted to hear from Trump, who did not mention him at a meeting in the Oval Office with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netnayahu the day after his death, even as he held forth on the plight of remaining hostages in the Gaza Strip.

“We have a U.S. citizen, a child, who was murdered in cold blood,” said Yaser Alkam, the head of the Turmus Ayya’s municipality. “Why should we not be treated equally as any other American?”

The Trump administration has been “fighting for the release of one of the American hostages in Gaza,” said Alkam, referring to Edan Alexander, a 21-year-old Israeli American soldier who grew up in the U.S.

After the Trump administration took power, it broke long-standing diplomatic protocol and started negotiating directly with Hamas to try to free Alexander — thought to be the last living American hostage in the enclave — and secure the release of the bodies of four other Israeli Americans in Gaza.

A poster of Amer Rabee is hung prior to a news conference Tuesday at the Palestinian American Community Center in Clifton, N.J. Chris Pedota / NorthJersey.com / USA Today Network

Like Amer’s family and many of the other residents in the village dubbed “little America” by Palestinians, Alkam said he has dual citizenship and divides his time between the West Bank and the U.S.

Turmus Ayya is the ancestral homeland for thousands of Palestinian Americans, many of whose ancestors immigrated to the United States decades ago. Their descendants return to inherited property in the town — homes, businesses and farms that allow residents to keep their feet in both cultures.

But even though many storefront signs in Turmus Ayya are written in English and pizza places are as common as shawarma stands, the town is fraught with danger.

Settler violence in the West Bank, including incursions into occupied territory and raids, has intensified since the start of Israel’s war in Gaza that has killed over 50,500 people there, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run enclave. The Israeli onslaught in Gaza followed a Hamas terror attack on Oct. 7, 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and about 250 taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies.

In an update late last month, the United Nations humanitarian affairs office said Israeli forces had killed 99 Palestinians this year in the West Bank.

In Turmus Ayya, villagers showed NBC News videos from security cameras of young men rampaging through the town committing violent acts of vandalism. NBC News could not independently verify that the footage was of Israeli settlers.

The Palestinian village of Turmus Ayya and the Israeli settlement of Shilo, background, in 2024. Zain Jaafar / AFP via Getty Images

Amer’s father, Mohammed, said settlers burned down one of the family’s vacation homes outside the village. He added that he regularly warns his sons not to venture to the outskirts for fear of settler attacks, even tracking their movements on a cellphone app.

Many of the uniformed soldiers are settlers themselves, deputized by the armed forces to carry and use firearms as a kind of local law enforcement.

“The reason why all this aggression happens is because they want to push out and take our land,” said Amer’s older brother Saad. “Us just being here, simply existing on this land, is an act of resistance, and it pushes back their illegal settler expansion.”

Along with its statement, the IDF released a grainy, night-vision video of what it said was the incident that showed three people, one of whom appeared to throw an object.

Both Amer’s father and brothers said they couldn’t identify him from the video, but that the shooting occurred at a well-known teenage hangout spot amid green almond trees that had just begun fruiting.

One of the other boys, Palestinian American Ayub Ijbara, remains in the hospital. Abdul Rahman Shhadah has returned home. Both are also 14.

Traipsing through the small town’s hilly outskirts is “something that Palestinian boys do,” Amer’s brother Saad said.

The family all said they thought it was unlikely that Amer and his friends had been throwing rocks at cars. If they were throwing rocks at all, it was more likely they were trying to knock the almonds from the trees.

But even if they had been targeting cars on the nearby road — which wasn’t clearly visible from the scene of the IDF shooting — teenage hijinks shouldn’t have merited a death sentence, they said.

“I want the whole world to hear our story so they can feel the same way if this happened to an American kid or an Israeli kid,” said Amer’s grandfather Amjad. “We want them to be safe in this world, not killed at 14 years old.”

In Rabee’s case, the gross violation of human rights in question would be extrajudicial killing, as defined under both the Leahy law and the Foreign Assistance Act. The IDF claimed that Rabee was allegedly throwing rocks and thus posed a threat. To justify its claim, the Israeli military released a grainy, 10-second video in black and white that appears to show three people throwing rocks, one of whom they say was Rabee. Yet the people are not at all identifiable in the video. So the IDF shot and killed this 14-year-old, and injured two other teenagers, with no actual evidence that they posed a threat.

Based off these facts alone, an independent investigation could determine which IDF unit was responsible—and if a U.S. weapon was used by the Israeli soldiers who shot and killed Rabee. If so, it would echo the case of Aysenur Eygi, an American and Turkish dual citizen, who was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier during a peaceful protest in the West Bank town of Beita, near Nablus, last year. A 5.56mm-caliber armor-piercing slug consistent with an American M4 assault rifle was retrieved from her body.

For nearly two decades, the State Department has avoided vetting Israeli military units for possible Leahy violations. Whenever such investigations began, they were met with a flurry of bureaucracy designed to shield Israel from accountability. The most notorious instance came last year, when then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken blocked the Leahy designation of Netzah Yehuda, the IDF unit responsible for the 2022 killing of 78-year-old Palestinian-American Omar Assad. After detaining Assad for no apparent reason, members of the Netzah Yehuda battalion bound and gagged him, leaving him at a construction site, where he died of a stress-induced heart attack. In 2022, after an IDF internal report faulted the soldiers for “a clear lapse of moral judgment” but did not hold them criminally responsible for Assad’s death, the State Department said that the U.S. government “expects a thorough criminal investigation and full accountability in this case.”

Blinken’s intervention in Assad’s case was symbolic of a top-down, systematic effort within the U.S. government to ensure that Israel was exempted from any ramifications that may come with the Leahy designation, extending back through several administrations, both Democratic and Republican. But more fundamentally, it was a symptom of a greater issue: the willingness of the U.S. to subvert the rule of law at the behest of Israel, while arbitrarily applying those same laws to other countries. Exempting Israel from the Leahy law provisions—along with a series of other measures on U.S. weapons export—has fostered a culture of impunity for Israel to violate both U.S. and international law with American-made arms.

The Israeli troop killing of a U.S. teen in the West Bank sparks outrage

toggle caption John Wessels/AFP via Getty Images

TEL AVIV, Israel — The weekend killing of a Palestinian American teenager by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank has sparked an outcry from relatives and community members in the Palestinian territory as well as the United States.

The family of 14-year-old Amir Rabee said he was picking olives with two friends, also U.S. citizens, on Sunday when Israeli forces fired at them.

The Israeli military said it opened fire toward three people who were endangering drivers by hurling rocks at a highway in the village of Turmus Ayya, killing one person and injuring the other two.

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The U.S. State Department confirmed the death of a U.S citizen in the West Bank, offering its condolences to the family.

It acknowledged the Israeli military’s statement that the killing was part of a counterterrorism operation and that the military was investigating.

toggle caption John Wessels/AFP via Getty Images

Born and raised in New Jersey

Rabee was born and raised in New Jersey until his family moved to their ancestral Palestinian town in the West Bank, Turmus Ayya. It’s a town near Jerusalem where many Palestinian U.S. citizens reside.

The boy’s father, Mohammed Rabee, said he called the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem to ask for medical help when he learned of the shooting, but it didn’t arrive in time, and he had to go to an Israeli military base in the city of Nablus to identify and pick up his son’s body.

When asked for comment on the incident, the U.S. Embassy referred NPR to the statement from the State Department.

“He was all naked, all blood everywhere,” Mohammed Rabee said.

He said he wants answers from the Israeli government.

“They call him [Amir] a terrorist,” he said. ” Even if he did something wrong, he’s under age.” He said, how could the soldiers shoot him down with multiple bullets?

The Israeli military released a black-and-white video showing what it said was Amir Rabee throwing rocks, but the elder Rabee said it was impossible to say if it was his son or not.

Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D.-N.J., said Amir’s death was an “atrocity” and fellow Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy demanded “answers from the Israeli government.”

“The tragic loss of life underscores that the current course of conflict is continuing to take too great of a toll on too many people,” Murphy said in a statement.

The latest American killed in the West Bank

The State Department said it was aware of the death of five U.S. citizens in the West Bank since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

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The last was a 26-year-old American Turkish woman who was shot by Israeli forces in September 2024 at a protest she attended in the West Bank.

Last year, four other U.S. citizens were killed in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by Israelis. All four families of those slain Americans told NPR they had heard nothing from the Justice Department; they said there was no indication U.S. authorities were investigating the deaths of their loved ones.

The head of Turmus Ayya municipality’s department of foreign relations, Yasir Alkam, said it was time for President Trump’s administration to take action.

“Put some pressure on the Netanyahu administration to at least protect its citizens residing in Palestine,” he told NPR.

A rise in violence against Palestinians in the West Bank

The United Nations has documented an increase in violence against Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli settlers and soldiers since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. It said 99 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces in 2025, as of the U.N. humanitarian affairs office’s last report in late March.

Israel launched its latest military operation in the West Bank last month, after a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas ended. Israel said it is rooting out militants who it said operate out of the refugee camps. Recent Israeli security operations in the West Bank have displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians, according to the U.N.

Nuha Musleh contributed reporting from Ramallah, West Bank. Michele Kelemen contributed reporting from Washington, D.C.

Mourners carry the body of Palestinian-American boy Omar Mohammad Rabea, 14, who was killed by Israeli forces in Turmus Ayya village, during his funeral, near Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank April 7, 2025. REUTERS/Ammar Awad/File photo Purchase Licensing Rights , opens new tab

WASHINGTON, April 8 (Reuters) – The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday it was aware of the killing by Israeli forces of a Palestinian American teenager in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and was seeking more information about the incident.

A State Department spokesperson made the comments to reporters when asked about the killing of U.S. citizen Omar Mohammad Rabea , 14, and the shooting of two other teenagers.

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“We are certainly aware of that dynamic,” the State Department spokesperson said. “There is an investigation that is going on. We are aware of the reports from the IDF that this was a counterterrorism act, we need to learn more about the nature of what happened on the ground.”

The Palestinian foreign ministry condemned the weekend incident as an “extra-judicial killing” by Israeli forces during a raid. A local mayor said Rabea was shot along with two other teenagers by an Israeli settler and that the Israeli army pronounced him dead after detaining him.

The Israeli military said it shot a “terrorist” who endangered civilians by hurling rocks.

“We don’t have the complete picture of what was going on on the ground,” the State Department spokesperson added.

The family of the teenager, who was a New Jersey native, said he was shot multiple times. Local community leaders gathered at the Palestinian American Community Center in Clifton, New Jersey, on Tuesday to pay tribute to him and demand justice.

Israel has expanded and consolidated settlements in the occupied West Bank as part of the steady integration of these territories into the state of Israel in breach of international law, the U.N. human rights office said last month.

The Israeli onslaught in Gaza followed a Hamas attack in October 2023 in which 1,200 were killed and about 250 taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies.

Reporting by Daphne Psaledakis and Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Christopher Cushing

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