Family of US citizen beaten to death by Israeli settlers calls on Trump administration to prosecute killers
The 20-year-old from Tampa was visiting his family in an area near Ramallah, and died last week trying to protect their farm from invaders, they said at an emotional press conference in Florida on Monday afternoon.
His uncle Hasem Musallet paid tribute to the 'loving, respectful' boy who loved baseball and had just opened an ice-cream business in Tampa with several of his cousins. He decried what the family saw as indifference from the US government over the murder of one of its citizens.
'Somebody needs to be held accountable,' he said.
Related: Israeli settlers kill American-Palestinian visiting relatives in West Bank, says family
'He wanted to be a businessman ever since he was young. He was planning on expanding, finding a wife, having a family. That was his dream but it was cut short at 20 years old, cut short unjustly.'
Musallet was beaten with clubs and bats, and died in the same attack that killed a 23-year-old Palestinian man. Razek Hussein al-Shalabi was shot and left to bleed to death, the Palestinian health ministry said.
Hasem Musallet said the settlers prevented ambulances from reaching the injured men, and that a brother watched Sayfollah take his last breath.
Hiba Rahim, deputy executive director of the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair), said Musallet's family wanted Donald Trump, and the departments of justice and state, to prosecute his killers under US law.
She also condemned a statement from the state department that said it had no comment on Musallet's death 'out of respect for the privacy of the family and loved ones during this difficult time'.
Rahim said: 'We're not asking, and his family is not asking, for silence. We're asking for accountability.
'If Sayfollah was killed by anyone else or in another country, there would already be investigations, there would already be attempts for arrest, and calls for arrest and outrage in Washington.
'Where is the outrage from our government? Where is the accountability?'
Hasem Musallet broke down in tears as he remembered his nephew as 'just a very rare soul' who would help anybody in need. He said Musallet was on a trip with family members from Florida, and enjoying time in the mountains and barbecuing with friends in the West Bank in the days before his death.
'He was very loving, caring. Just like any other 20-year-old he would go out with his friends after work, he'd watch comedy, he'd go out driving, he'd go to the beach. He would come to my house always, and come to his grandmother and give her a hug and kiss her hand,' Hasem said.
The Israeli military claimed the incident happened after stones were thrown at Israelis and that 'a violent confrontation developed' and said it was looking into the incident. Rahim dismissed this, saying: 'There were no clashes. These are the same lies we hear every time a guilty party is guilty of monstrous activity like what we saw with Sayfollah's death.
'This is not an isolated tragedy. There's a devastating pattern of Americans being killed in Israel, brutalized and murdered with impunity by Israeli forces and settlers.'
Musallet's death is part of a growing wave of violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the territory and injured at least 9,000 since the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023.
The Guardian has contacted the state department for further comment.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hill
16 minutes ago
- The Hill
From tech podcasts to policy: Trump's new AI plan leans heavily on Silicon Valley industry ideas
President Donald Trump has unveiled a sweeping new plan for America's 'global dominance' in artificial intelligence, proposing to cut back environmental regulations to speed up the construction of AI supercomputers while promoting the sale of U.S.-made AI technologies at home and abroad. The 'AI Action Plan' introduced Wednesday embraces many of the ideas voiced by tech industry lobbyists and the Silicon Valley investors who backed Trump's election campaign last year. The White House on Wednesday revealed the 'AI Action Plan' Trump ordered after returning to the White House in January. Trump gave his tech advisers six months to come up with new AI policies after revoking President Joe Biden's signature AI guardrails on his first day in office. The unveiling is co-hosted by the bipartisan Hill and Valley Forum and the 'All-In' podcast, a business and technology show hosted by four tech investors and entrepreneurs, which includes Trump's AI czar, David Sacks. The plan includes some familiar tech lobby pitches. That includes accelerating the sale of AI technology abroad and making it easier to construct the energy-hungry data center buildings that are needed to form and run AI products. It also includes some of the AI culture war preoccupations of the circle of venture capitalists who endorsed Trump last year. Trump's AI plan: global dominance, cutting regulations The plan prioritizes AI innovation and adoption, urging the removal of any 'red tape' that could be slowing down adoption across industries and government. But it also seeks to guide the industry's growth to address a longtime rallying point for the tech industry's loudest Trump backers: countering the liberal bias they see in AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Google's Gemini. Trump's plan seeks to block the government from contracting with tech companies unless they 'ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.' A Biden-era framework for evaluating the riskiest AI applications should also be stripped of any references to 'misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change,' the plan said. The plan also says the nation's leading AI models should protect free speech and be 'founded on American values,' though it doesn't define which values those should include. Sacks, a former PayPal executive and now Trump's top AI adviser, has been criticizing 'woke AI' for more than a year, fueled by Google's February 2024 rollout of an AI image generator that, when asked to show an American Founding Father, created pictures of Black, Asian and Native American men. Google quickly fixed its tool, but the 'Black George Washington' moment remained a parable for the problem of AI's perceived political bias, taken up by X owner Elon Musk, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Vice President JD Vance and Republican lawmakers. Streamlining AI data center permits to speed up supercomputer construction The plan aims to speed up permitting and loosen environmental regulation to accelerate construction on new data centers and factories and the power sources to fuel them. It condemns 'radical climate dogma' and recommends lifting a number of environmental restrictions, including clean air and water laws. Trump has previously paired AI's need for huge amounts of electricity with his own push to tap into U.S. energy sources, including gas, coal and nuclear. Many tech giants are already well on their way toward building new data centers in the U.S. and around the world. OpenAI announced this week that it has switched on the first phase of a massive data center complex in Abilene, Texas, part of an Oracle-backed project known as Stargate that Trump promoted earlier this year. Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and xAI also have major projects underway. The tech industry has pushed for easier permitting rules to get its computing facilities connected to power, but the AI building boom has also contributed to spiking demand for fossil fuel production, which will contribute to global warming. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday called on the world's major tech firms to power data centers completely with renewables by 2030. 'A typical AI data center eats up as much electricity as 100,000 homes,' Guterres said. 'By 2030, data centers could consume as much electricity as all of Japan does today.' The plan includes a strategy to disincentivize states from aggressively regulating AI technology. It recommends that federal agencies 'consider a state's AI regulatory climate when making funding decisions and limit funding if the state's AI regulatory regimes may hinder the effectiveness of that funding or award.' Trump's Republican administration had supported a different proposal in Congress to block states from passing any AI laws for 10 years, but the Senate defeated it earlier this month. Who benefits from Trump's AI action plan? There are sharp debates on how to regulate AI, even among the influential venture capitalists who have been debating it on their favorite medium: the podcast. While some Trump backers, particularly Andreessen, have advocated an 'accelerationist' approach that aims to speed up AI advancement with minimal regulation, Sacks has described himself as taking a middle road of techno-realism. 'Technology is going to happen. Trying to stop it is like ordering the tides to stop. If we don't do it, somebody else will,' Sacks said on the 'All-In' podcast. On Tuesday, more than 100 groups, including labor unions, parent groups, environmental justice organizations and privacy advocates, signed a resolution opposing Trump's embrace of industry-driven AI policy and calling for a 'People's AI Action Plan' that would 'deliver first and foremost for the American people.' Amba Kak, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, which helped lead the effort, said the coalition expects Trump's plan to come 'straight from Big Tech's mouth.' 'Every time we say, 'What about our jobs, our air, water, our children?' they're going to say, 'But what about China?'' she said in a call with reporters Tuesday. She said Americans should reject the White House's argument that the industry is overregulated and fight to preserve 'baseline protections for the public' as AI technology advances.
The Hill
16 minutes ago
- The Hill
House GOP moves to establish long-delayed Jan. 6 committee
House Republicans are moving to create a long-delayed select subcommittee to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack — more than six months after it was initially announced. A resolution to create the subcommittee was filed on Wednesday, GOP leaders tell The Hill, after months of it being put on the backburner and lawmakers hashing out disputes over how much the panel would be authorized to investigate. Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), who is leading the effort, got direct support from President Trump in pushing to finally create the committee, The Hill has learned. It will still be weeks before the committee is established. With the House heading out of town over the August recess, a vote on the resolution to create the select committee is not expected until the chamber returns in September. As a select subcommittee, all the members will be subject to the approval of the Speaker. The select subcommittee will be tucked under the House Judiciary Committee and chaired by Loudermilk, who led probes into Jan. 6 matters in the last Congress under the banner of the House Administration Committee's subcommittee on oversight. Loudermilk's previous investigations included the Capitol security posture, as well as the activities of the Democratic-led Jan. 6 committee established after Trump supporters stormed the building in support of his fraud claims. 'House Republicans are proud of our work so far in exposing the false narratives peddled by the politically motivated January 6 Select Committee during the 117th Congress, but there is clearly more work to be done,' Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said in a statement first shared with The Hill. 'The resolution introduced today will establish this Select Subcommittee so we can continue our efforts to uncover the full truth that is owed to the American people. House Republicans remain intent on delivering the answers that House Democrats skipped over.' Loudermilk had secured a commitment to lead a select subcommittee to further investigate Jan. 6 issues in this Congress, and Johnson announced the panel in January. But months went by and no committee was established, frustrating Loudermilk. Matters from a government shutdown deadline to the crafting of Trump's 'One Big Beautiful Bill' took precedence. There were also disputes about what the legislative jurisdiction of the panel would be, with Loudermilk wanting to carry on all the lines of inquiry from his previous probes and being dismayed by the Speaker's office originally pitching a plan that would limit the jurisdiction to that of the House Judiciary Committee. Those jurisdictional issues were resolved, a source told The Hill. The panel has the Judiciary Committee's broad scope over law enforcement and more when investigating matters related to Jan. 6 — as well as a commitment from chairmen from other areas of jurisdiction and the White House to green-light probes into any other lines of inquiry. That could include more investigation into the original Democratic-controlled Jan. 6 panel. Loudermilk will also have full subpoena power. The panel will have eight members, three of whom will be members appointed by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) subject to the Speaker's approval. It is instructed to release a final report by Dec. 31, 2026. Loudermilk said in a statement that while his previous probes 'uncovered that what happened at the Capitol that day was the result of a series of intelligence, security, and leadership failures at multiple levels within numerous entities,' there is 'still much work to be done.' 'It is vital that we continue to uncover the facts and begin the task of making needed reforms to ensure this level of security failure may never happen again,' Loudermilk said. House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) took a swipe at the previous Democratic-led Jan. 6 committee while commending Loudermilk. 'The partisan January 6 Committee failed to uncover crucial pieces of information for the American people, and Rep. Loudermilk has been the leader in getting to the bottom of the Democrat-run Committee's failures. Rep. Loudermilk will continue to work tirelessly to get everyone the truth,' Jordan said in a statement. The Democrats' previous Jan. 6 panel drew Trump's ire — and its members, which included now-Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), received a preemptive pardon from former President Biden on his last day in office amid threats of prosecution. Loudermilk and Jordan both have some personal beef with the original Jan. 6 committee. Jordan refused to comply with a subpoena it issued him, arguing it was not a legitimate inquiry. And the panel asked the Georgia lawmaker to appear voluntarily to explain a tour he gave in the Capitol complex on Jan. 5, 2021 — a request he said was meant to push a 'false narrative.' Loudermilk's previous panel released an 'interim report' in December 2024 that recommended a criminal investigation into Cheney, accusing her of witness tampering by being in touch with star hearing witness Cassidy Hutchinson.
Politico
17 minutes ago
- Politico
Gabbard declassifies new docs in latest push to cast doubt on Russia assessment
It also took no issue with the determination that Putin sought to undermine both American democracy generally and Clinton, who the Russian leader assumed would be the country's next president. 'Most ICA judgments on Russian activities in the U.S. election employed proper tradecraft and were consistent with observed Russian behavior,' the review stated. It found fault mainly with how the intelligence community arrived at its third high-confidence assessment about that year's election: that Putin and others in the Russian government wanted to see Trump in the White House. Obama-era intelligence officials based their conclusion largely on a 'scant, unclear and unverifiable fragment' from a single spy source, the report said. It also argued that the agency did not adhere to spy community standards in sufficiently considering alternative explanations for Putin's actions or informing policymakers of intelligence that called his alleged preference for Trump into question. For example, the report said Russian intelligence services had explosive information on Clinton that they never leaked to the press. That included information allegedly indicating Clinton had significant health issues, the report said. The report heaps significant criticism on then-CIA Director John Brennan. It finds Brennan pushed for inclusion of the assessment on Putin's preference for Trump in the aftermath of the 2016 vote and against the recommendation of some analysts beneath him. Brennan could not be reached for comment. But a spokesperson for Obama offered a rare public rebuke of the allegations after Trump accused the former president and other former senior officials of treason on Tuesday night. The House panel's report in some places echoed the CIA's recent review. Both raise questions about how few intelligence officials were involved in conducting the assessment, and whether Obama administration officials were transparent about the extent to which they relied on the now-debunked Steele dossier, for example. In their statements Wednesday, Warner and Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) both pointed out that a multivolume review produced by the Senate Intelligence Committee did not find the same issues as the 44-page House review.
