Calling it a “criminal and terrorist act,” the U.S. ambassador to Israel has demanded the country “aggressively investigate the murder” of an American who was beaten to death by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.
U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee's comments are the strongest issued by the State Department since the death of Sayfollah Musallet, known as Saif, and the first time it has directly called on Israel to investigate the incident.
“There must be accountability for this criminal and terrorist act,” Huckabee said on X.
Musallet had traveled from his home in Tampa, Florida, to visit his mom, brother and sister.
Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who was governor of Arkansas from 1996 to 2007, maintained an arch-conservative position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when he ran for president in 2016. He has long been a staunch advocate for settlers’ rights to colonize Palestinian land.
Nizar Milbes, a close family friend of the Musallets, welcomed Huckabee’s statement, saying in a telephone interview Wednesday that it “sounded good,” although he questioned whether the demand was “just talk or is there going to be action behind it?”
Milbes, who is visiting the West Bank from California, added that the family wanted U.S. authorities to be involved in the investigation.
Musallet's friends and family paid their final respects to him at a funeral Sunday, video published by The Associated Press showed. Among the mourners was his father, who raced from Florida to be there.
“We demand justice against these settler terrorists,” Musallet’s father, identified as Kamil Musallet, told the AP. He called on the U.S. government to “do something about it.”
A second man identified, as Mohammed al-Shalabi, 23, was also killed in the incident Friday, according to the Palestinian Foreign Affairs Ministry.
It was not immediately clear how the events leading up to their deaths unfolded.
The Israel Defense Forces said Friday it was aware of reports of a Palestinian civilian killed and a number of Palestinians injured, and it said Israeli authorities looking into the matter.
Police told NBC News that several people from “both sides” were detained at the scene on suspicion of involvement in acts of violence and that the Israel Police and the IDF military police had launched a joint investigation.
Asked for an update on the probe Wednesday, the IDF repeated that the Israel Police and the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division had launched an investigation. The Israel Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A spokesperson for the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Musallet was killed comes amid a deadly rise in settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. A United Nations report in March said violence had “increased in a climate of continuing impunity.”
Hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers live in sweeping settlements across the West Bank that the international community widely considers to be illegal.
More than 960 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, according to a database maintained by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), a sharp increase from previous years.
In the year leading up to the Hamas attacks, just over 250 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank according to OCHA's data.
Settlers rarely face legal consequences for violence against Palestinians, according to Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, with more than 93% of investigations from 2005 to 2023 closed without indictments and only 3% leading to convictions, according to a report it published last year.
