US asks Israel to probe ‘terrorist' killing of American citizen by settlers
Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, said on Tuesday that he asked Israel to 'aggressively investigate' the killing of the Florida-born Musallet, who was visiting family when he was attacked in the Palestinian town of Sinjil.
'There must be accountability for this criminal and terrorist act,' Huckabee wrote in a social media post. 'Saif was just 20 yrs old.'
The US envoy's statement stops short of backing the Musallet family's demand for Washington to launch its own probe into the killing.
Critics say Israel rarely holds its settlers or soldiers accountable for abuses against Palestinians. Musllet was the ninth US citizen to be killed by Israel since 2022. None of the previous cases has led to criminal charges.
Yet, the strongly worded post marks a rare critical stance towards Israel by Huckabee, a staunch Israel supporter, who has previously said, 'There's really no such thing as a Palestinian.'
Another Palestinian, identified by health officials as Mohammed Shalabi, was shot dead by settlers during the same attack that killed Musallet on Friday.
Israeli settlers have been intensifying their assaults on Palestinian communities in the West Bank since the outbreak of the war on Gaza in 2023.
Often protected by the Israeli military, settlers regularly descend from their illegal settlements onto Palestinian towns, where they ransack homes, cars and farms and attack anyone who may stand in their way.
Several Western countries, including top allies of Israel, have imposed sanctions on far-right Israeli officials and groups over settler violence.
Trump lifted sanctions related to settler attacks, put in place by his predecessor, Joe Biden, after returning to the White House earlier this year.
The US provides Israel with billions of dollars in military aid annually.
Over the past few days, several Congress members have called for accountability for Musallet.
Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, called the killing of Musallet 'shocking and appalling'.
'The Israeli government must thoroughly investigate this killing and hold any and all settlers responsible for the brutal death of Mr Musallet accountable to the fullest extent of the law,' he said in a statement.
Congressman Maxwell Frost, who represents a district in Florida, also decried the 'cold-blooded murder'.
'As our country's self-proclaimed peacemaker, Donald Trump has a moral and constitutional obligation to direct the State Department to conduct a thorough investigation and, more importantly, to demand full justice and accountability for those responsible for this heinous act,' Frost said in a statement.
'Our country must ensure the protection and safety of Americans abroad.'
On Friday, Israel said it was 'investigating' what happened in Sinjil, claiming that the violence started when Palestinians threw rocks at an Israeli vehicle.
'Shortly thereafter, violent clashes developed in the area between Palestinians and Israeli civilians, which included the destruction of Palestinian property, arson, physical confrontations, and stone-throwing,' the Israeli military said in a statement.
But Musallet's family has disputed any account of 'clashes', saying that a 'mob' of settlers surrounded the young Palestinian American for three hours during the attack and prevented medics from reaching him.
Florida's Republican politicians have been largely silent about the killing of Musallet. The offices of the state's two senators, Rick Scott and Ashley Moody, did not respond to Al Jazeera's request for comment.
Since Musallet was killed on Friday, Scott has shared several social media posts in support of Israel.
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18 minutes ago
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Analysis: ‘Bomb first' – Trump's approach to war-making in his second term
Washington, DC – During the first six months of his second term, Donald Trump pushed the limits of US presidential power while aiming to reorient US foreign policy to 'America First'. His first months in office have also offered a window into the future of his administration's approach to war-making, what analysts characterise as an at times contradictory tactic that oscillates between avowed anti-interventionism and quicksilver military attacks, justified as 'peace through strength'. While questions remain over whether Trump has indeed pursued a coherent strategy when it comes to direct US involvement in international conflict, one thing has been clear in the first portion of Trump's second four-year term: US air attacks, long Washington's tool of choice since launching the so-called 'war on terror' in the early 2000s, have again surged. According to a report released last week by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), since Trump's re-entry into office on January 20, the US has carried out 529 air attacks in 240 locations across the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. That figure, which accounts for just the first five months of Trump's four-year term as president, is already nearing the 555 attacks launched by the administration of US President Joe Biden over his whole term from 2021 to 2025. 'The most extreme tool at his disposal – targeted airstrikes – is being used not as a last resort, but as the first move,' Clionadh Raleigh, a professor of political geography and conflict and founder of ACLED, said in a statement accompanying the report. 'While Trump has repeatedly promised to end America's 'forever wars', he has rarely elaborated on how. These early months suggest the plan may be to use overwhelming firepower to end fights before they begin, or before they drag on.' A 'Trump Doctrine'? Trump's willingness to unleash lethal force abroad – and the inherent risk that the brazen approach carries of dragging the US into protracted conflict – has already roiled influential segments of the president's Make America Great Again (MAGA) base, coming to a head over Trump's six-week bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen and, more recently, his June decision to strike three nuclear facilities in Iran amid Israel's offensive on its neighbour. In turn, Trump's top officials have sought to bring coherence to the strategy, with Vice President JD Vance in late June offering the clearest vision yet of a Trump blueprint for foreign intervention. 'What I call the 'Trump Doctrine' is quite simple,' Vance said at the Ohio speech. 'Number one, you articulate a clear American interest, and that's in this case that Iran can't have a nuclear weapon.' 'Number two, you try to aggressively diplomatically solve that problem,' he said. 'And number three, when you can't solve it diplomatically, you use overwhelming military power to solve it, and then you get the hell out of there before it ever becomes a protracted conflict.' But the reality of Trump's early diplomatic and military adventures has not matched the vision outlined by Vance, according to Michael Wahid Hanna, the US Program Director at Crisis Group. He called the statement an attempt to 'retrofit coherence'. While Hanna cautioned against putting too much stock into a unified strategy, he did point to one 'consistent thread': a diplomatic approach that appears 'haphazard, not fully conceived, and characterised by impatience'. 'For all of the talk about being a peacemaker and wanting to see quick deals, Trump has a particularly unrealistic view of the ways in which diplomacy can work,' he told Al Jazeera. The US president had vowed to transform peace efforts in the Russia-Ukraine war, but an earlier pressure campaign against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has since seen Trump circle back to the Biden administration's hardline approach to Russia, with little progress made in between. After an initial ceasefire in Gaza, Trump officials have failed to make meaningful progress in reigning in Israel's war, leaving the threat of knock-on conflicts, including with Iran and the Houthis in Yemen, unanswered. Earlier diplomatic overtures to address Iran's nuclear programme stalled as Trump took a maximalist approach seeking to block any uranium enrichment. The effort dissolved after the US failed to constrain Israel's military campaign against Tehran, as the US continues to provide billions in military funding to the 'ironclad ally'. 'It's hard to argue, as Vance did, that the United States has really pushed as hard as they can on diplomacy,' Hanna told Al Jazeera. Under Vance's logic, he added, 'that leaves them with no other means than to respond militarily'. 'Bomb first and ask questions later'? The early emphasis on air attacks has been accompanied by vows by Trump and his Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth to restore a 'warrior ethos' within the US military. Indeed, Trump has appeared to relish the military actions, posting a video of the attack on an ISIL (ISIS) affiliated target in Somalia on February 1, just 10 days after taking office. He made a point to draw a comparison to Biden, who tightened rules of engagement policies Trump had loosened during his first term and entered office vowing to severely limit the reliance on US strikes. Trump wrote that 'Biden and his cronies wouldn't act quickly enough to get the job done'. 'I did! The message to ISIS and all others who would attack Americans is that 'WE WILL FIND YOU, AND WE WILL KILL YOU!' All told since taking office six months ago, Trump has carried out at least 44 air strikes in Somalia, where the US has long targeted both a local ISIL offshoot and al-Shabab, according to ACLED data. The Biden administration carried out just over 60 such strikes during his entire four years in office. The US president has posted similarly boastful messages about strikes in Yemen, where his administration conducted a bombing campaign from March to May, accounting for the vast majority of overall strikes during his second term, as well as US strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, which Trump declared were 'obliterated like nobody's ever seen before', long before any in-depth assessment had been made. Raleigh, who is also a professor of political geography and conflict at the University of Sussex, said the increase could possibly be attributed to Trump's pivot away from the soft-power policy of Biden, which has included shearing down the US State Department and dismantling the US foreign aid apparatus. That could further be viewed as an effort by Trump to place the US as a 'player in a new internationalised conflict environment', where overall violence by state actors on foreign soil has increased steadily in recent years, currently accounting for 30 percent of all violent events ACLED tracks globally. 'But I would say there's still no clear Trump doctrine, as much as Vance wants to claim that there is,' Raleigh told Al Jazeera. 'And at the moment, it's looking a little bit like 'bomb first and ask questions later.'' That approach has proven to have particularly deadly consequences, according to Emily Tripp, the director of Airwars. She drew a parallel to Trump's first term, when he also surged air strikes, outpacing those of his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, who himself oversaw an expansion of drone warfare abroad. The monitor has tracked 224 reported civilian casualties in Yemen from US strikes under Trump in 2025, nearly totaling the 258 reported civilian casualties from US actions in the country during the 23 years prior. The administration has also used particularly powerful – and expensive – munitions in its strikes, which Airwars has assessed as appearing to have been deployed against a broader set of targets than under Biden. Two of the Trump administration's strikes on Yemen, one on Ras Isa Port and another on a migrant detention centre in Saada, have been deemed possible war crimes by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. 'That's not typical, or necessarily something you'd expect in a campaign whose remit, as defined by Trump, Hegseth, and [US Central Command], is on largely economic targets,' Tripp told Al Jazeera. 'There's really no reason for there to be such high levels of civilian harm,' she said. Tripp added she was still waiting to assess how the Pentagon approaches civilian casualty investigations and transparency under Trump's second term. Questions over efficacy It remains unclear whether the administration's reliance on swift and powerful military strikes will actually prove effective in keeping the US troops out of protracted conflict. While a tenuous ceasefire continues to hold with the Houthis, the results of the US bombing campaign 'have been pretty underwhelming', the Crisis Group's Hanna said, noting that few underlying conditions have changed. The group has continued to strike vessels in the Red Sea and to launch missiles at Israel in opposition to the war in Gaza. An attack in early July prompted State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce to warn the US 'will continue to take necessary action to protect freedom of navigation and commercial shipping'. The jury also remains out on whether Trump's strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities will lead to a diplomatic breakthrough on Iran's nuclear programme, as the White House has maintained. Little progress has been made since a ceasefire was reached shortly after Tehran launched retaliatory strikes on a US base in Qatar. Crisis Group's Hanna assessed that Trump has relied on air strikes in part because they have become somewhat 'antiseptic' in US society, with their toll 'shielded from a lot of public scrutiny'. But, he added: 'There are limits in terms of what air power alone can do…That's just the reality.'
Al Jazeera
an hour ago
- Al Jazeera
‘Bomb first': Trump's approach to US war-making in his second term
Washington, DC – During the first six months of his second term, Donald Trump pushed the limits of US presidential power while aiming to reorient US foreign policy to 'America First'. His first months in office have also offered a window into the future of his administration's approach to war-making, what analysts characterise as an at times contradictory tactic that oscillates between avowed anti-interventionism and quicksilver military attacks, justified as 'peace through strength'. While questions remain over whether Trump has indeed pursued a coherent strategy when it comes to direct US involvement in international conflict, one thing has been clear in the first portion of Trump's second four-year term: US air attacks, long Washington's tool of choice since launching the so-called 'war on terror' in the early 2000s, have again surged. According to a report released last week by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), since Trump's re-entry into office on January 20, the US has carried out 529 air attacks in 240 locations across the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. That figure, which accounts for just the first five months of Trump's four-year term as president, is already nearing the 555 attacks launched by the administration of US President Joe Biden over his whole term from 2021 to 2025. 'The most extreme tool at his disposal – targeted airstrikes – is being used not as a last resort, but as the first move,' Clionadh Raleigh, a professor of political geography and conflict and founder of ACLED, said in a statement accompanying the report. 'While Trump has repeatedly promised to end America's 'forever wars', he has rarely elaborated on how. These early months suggest the plan may be to use overwhelming firepower to end fights before they begin, or before they drag on.' A 'Trump Doctrine'? Trump's willingness to unleash lethal force abroad – and the inherent risk that the brazen approach carries of dragging the US into protracted conflict – has already roiled influential segments of the president's Make America Great Again (MAGA) base, coming to a head over Trump's six-week bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen and, more recently, his June decision to strike three nuclear facilities in Iran amid Israel's offensive on its neighbour. In turn, Trump's top officials have sought to bring coherence to the strategy, with Vice President JD Vance in late June offering the clearest vision yet of a Trump blueprint for foreign intervention. 'What I call the 'Trump Doctrine' is quite simple,' Vance said at the Ohio speech. 'Number one, you articulate a clear American interest, and that's in this case that Iran can't have a nuclear weapon.' 'Number two, you try to aggressively diplomatically solve that problem,' he said. 'And number three, when you can't solve it diplomatically, you use overwhelming military power to solve it, and then you get the hell out of there before it ever becomes a protracted conflict.' But the reality of Trump's early diplomatic and military adventures has not matched the vision outlined by Vance, according to Michael Wahid Hanna, the US Program Director at Crisis Group. He called the statement an attempt to 'retrofit coherence'. While Hanna cautioned against putting too much stock into a unified strategy, he did point to one 'consistent thread': a diplomatic approach that appears 'haphazard, not fully conceived, and characterised by impatience'. 'For all of the talk about being a peacemaker and wanting to see quick deals, Trump has a particularly unrealistic view of the ways in which diplomacy can work,' he told Al Jazeera. The US president had vowed to transform peace efforts in the Russia-Ukraine war, but an earlier pressure campaign against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has since seen Trump circle back to the Biden administration's hardline approach to Russia, with little progress made in between. After an initial ceasefire in Gaza, Trump officials have failed to make meaningful progress in reigning in Israel's war, leaving the threat of knock-on conflicts, including with Iran and the Houthis in Yemen, unanswered. Earlier diplomatic overtures to address Iran's nuclear programme stalled as Trump took a maximalist approach seeking to block any uranium enrichment. The effort dissolved after the US failed to constrain Israel's military campaign against Tehran, as the US continues to provide billions in military funding to the 'ironclad ally'. 'It's hard to argue, as Vance did, that the United States has really pushed as hard as they can on diplomacy,' Hanna told Al Jazeera. Under Vance's logic, he added, 'that leaves them with no other means than to respond militarily'. 'Bomb first and ask questions later'? The early emphasis on air attacks has been accompanied by vows by Trump and his Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth to restore a 'warrior ethos' within the US military. Indeed, Trump has appeared to relish the military actions, posting a video of the attack on an ISIL (ISIS) affiliated target in Somalia on February 1, just 10 days after taking office. He made a point to draw a comparison to Biden, who tightened rules of engagement policies Trump had loosened during his first term and entered office vowing to severely limit the reliance on US strikes. Trump wrote that 'Biden and his cronies wouldn't act quickly enough to get the job done'. 'I did! The message to ISIS and all others who would attack Americans is that 'WE WILL FIND YOU, AND WE WILL KILL YOU!' All told since taking office six months ago, Trump has carried out at least 44 air strikes in Somalia, where the US has long targeted both a local ISIL offshoot and al-Shabab, according to ACLED data. The Biden administration carried out just over 60 such strikes during his entire four years in office. The US president has posted similarly boastful messages about strikes in Yemen, where his administration conducted a bombing campaign from March to May, accounting for the vast majority of overall strikes during his second term, as well as US strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, which Trump declared were 'obliterated like nobody's ever seen before', long before any in-depth assessment had been made. Raleigh, who is also a professor of political geography and conflict at the University of Sussex, said the increase could possibly be attributed to Trump's pivot away from the soft-power policy of Biden, which has included shearing down the US State Department and dismantling the US foreign aid apparatus. That could further be viewed as an effort by Trump to place the US as a 'player in a new internationalised conflict environment', where overall violence by state actors on foreign soil has increased steadily in recent years, currently accounting for 30 percent of all violent events ACLED tracks globally. 'But I would say there's still no clear Trump doctrine, as much as Vance wants to claim that there is,' Raleigh told Al Jazeera. 'And at the moment, it's looking a little bit like 'bomb first and ask questions later.'' That approach has proven to have particularly deadly consequences, according to Emily Tripp, the director of Airwars. She drew a parallel to Trump's first term, when he also surged air strikes, outpacing those of his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, who himself oversaw an expansion of drone warfare abroad. The monitor has tracked 224 reported civilian casualties in Yemen from US strikes under Trump in 2025, nearly totaling the 258 reported civilian casualties from US actions in the country during the 23 years prior. The administration has also used particularly powerful – and expensive – munitions in its strikes, which Airwars has assessed as appearing to have been deployed against a broader set of targets than under Biden. Two of the Trump administration's strikes on Yemen, one on Ras Isa Port and another on a migrant detention centre in Saada, have been deemed possible war crimes by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. 'That's not typical, or necessarily something you'd expect in a campaign whose remit, as defined by Trump, Hegseth, and [US Central Command], is on largely economic targets,' Tripp told Al Jazeera. 'There's really no reason for there to be such high levels of civilian harm,' she said. Tripp added she was still waiting to assess how the Pentagon approaches civilian casualty investigations and transparency under Trump's second term. Questions over efficacy It remains unclear whether the administration's reliance on swift and powerful military strikes will actually prove effective in keeping the US troops out of protracted conflict. While a tenuous ceasefire continues to hold with the Houthis, the results of the US bombing campaign 'have been pretty underwhelming', the Crisis Group's Hanna said, noting that few underlying conditions have changed. The group has continued to strike vessels in the Red Sea and to launch missiles at Israel in opposition to the war in Gaza. An attack in early July prompted State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce to warn the US 'will continue to take necessary action to protect freedom of navigation and commercial shipping'. The jury also remains out on whether Trump's strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities will lead to a diplomatic breakthrough on Iran's nuclear programme, as the White House has maintained. Little progress has been made since a ceasefire was reached shortly after Tehran launched retaliatory strikes on a US base in Qatar. Crisis Group's Hanna assessed that Trump has relied on air strikes in part because they have become somewhat 'antiseptic' in US society, with their toll 'shielded from a lot of public scrutiny'. But, he added: 'There are limits in terms of what air power alone can do…That's just the reality.'
Al Jazeera
an hour ago
- Al Jazeera
US Justice Department to discuss Epstein with Ghislaine Maxwell
Officials from the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) are set to interview sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell in Florida, as pressure continues to mount on the administration of US President Donald Trump over the handling of the files of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Former British socialite Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence after being convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking minors on behalf of Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial in his own paedophile trafficking case. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche – Trump's former personal lawyer for his hush money trial and two federal criminal cases – was to interview Maxwell on Thursday at a federal courthouse in Tallahassee, Florida, multiple US media outlets reported. In a social media post on Tuesday, Blanche said that Trump 'has told us to release all credible evidence' and that if Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ 'will hear what she has to say.' A DOJ spokesman did not immediately return a message from The Associated Press seeking comment on Thursday. The person who confirmed the meeting to The Associated Press insisted on anonymity to describe a closed-door encounter. Maxwell, the daughter of the late British press baron Robert Maxwell, is the only former Epstein associate who was convicted in connection with his activities, which conspiracy theorists allege included trafficking young models for VIPs. Joyce Vance, an ex-federal prosecutor who now teaches law at the University of Alabama, said any ''new' testimony [Maxwell] offers is inherently unreliable unless backed by evidence.' 'Trump could give Ghislaine Maxwell a pardon on his last day in office, in exchange for favourable testimony now,' Vance said in a post on X. 'She knows he's her only chance for release.' 'Client list' The meeting with Maxwell marks another attempt by the Trump administration to defuse anger among the Republican president's own supporters over what they have long seen as a cover-up of sex crimes by Epstein, a wealthy financier with high-level connections. On July 7, the DOJ and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a memo saying that a review of Epstein's case yielded no new evidence, including no 'client list'. But that finding caused an uproar among Trump's Make America Great Again (MAGA) base, which noted that US Attorney General Pam Bondi herself had referred to a client list 'sitting on my desk right now' earlier this year. Members of Trump's base have long embraced conspiracy theories about rings of sex offenders in the highest levels of government, and some have questioned the circumstances surrounding Epstein's death, speculating that it was an orchestrated cover-up. On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Maxwell to appear before Congress next month, noting in a statement that 'the facts and circumstances surrounding both your and Mr Epstein's cases have received immense public interest and scrutiny'. The committee's Republican chair, US Representative James Comer, noted in his statement that while the DOJ was moving forward with its interview, 'It is imperative that Congress conduct oversight of the federal government's enforcement of sex trafficking laws generally and specifically its handling of the investigation and prosecution of you and Mr Epstein.' Democrats have also pushed for the release of the Epstein files, and on Wednesday, a Republican-led panel pushed forward a Democrat-led subcommittee subpoena demanding that the DOJ release the Epstein files. In an interview with political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen, US Representative Jasmine Crockett, a Democrat, said she would trust Congress to interview Maxwell more than the DOJ, noting the potential for 'them sanitising the information that we get, or potentially engaging in some type of threats, or potentially offering a pardon if certain things were said or not said'.
