No Protection, No Justice: US Citizens Killed with Impunity by Israel
On a cold night in January 2022, Omar Assad, an elderly Palestinian American man, was driving back to his town in the West Bank after a night of playing cards at his cousin’s house. According to a leaked internal Israeli investigation, Assad was stopped at a surprise checkpoint by Israeli soldiers, dragged from his car, blindfolded, gagged, and handcuffed, and taken to a construction site, where he was detained. After he had “fallen asleep,” as the soldiers claimed, they abandoned him at the site, unconscious, in near-freezing weather and without calling a medic. Later, another Palestinian man detained at the same site checked on Assad and found him dead, a plastic zip-tie still on his wrist.
Assad had spent 40 years of his life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he raised his children. In 2009, he moved back to his homeland to live out his final years. According to the soldiers, Assad had protested loudly during his arrest that he was not a terrorist. Those may have been his last words.
The United States government initially asked Israel for “clarification” about the incident, and upon learning the result of Israel’s investigation, said that it was “deeply concerned by the circumstances of the death.” Two members of Congress from Assad’s home state of Wisconsin called for an independent investigation, but none was conducted. Assad’s widow pressed the US government for action but expected little. Two years after the incident, she said, “I don’t think [the US] will do anything, because they give [Israeli forces] the freedom to do whatever they want. They kill many people without compassion—the elderly, women, or children.”
Assad’s case is one of many that demonstrates that US citizenship offers no protection from violence at the hands of the Israeli state and no guarantee of accountability for its perpetrators. Not only Palestinian Americans are at risk; several US citizens who are not Palestinian have also been subjected to violence by Israeli government forces on Palestinian land.
The United States has protected Israel from international scrutiny for decades. It has never seriously engaged with the evidence of Israel’s regular violations of international law as it dehumanizes and mistreats Palestinians and appropriates their land, and as it harms Americans. Evidence suggests that Washington prioritizes its relationship with Israel over the welfare of its own citizens.
No Protection, No Accountability
Across the Occupied Territories, the threats to Palestinian life are numerous. For more than two years, Israeli bombardment and siege have devastated the Gaza Strip, while violence and land seizures are escalating in the West Bank. In addition to the many tens of thousands reported killed by Israel’s war on Gaza, hundreds of Palestinians each year are killed by forced displacement, arbitrary incarceration, and restrictions of freedom of movement, as well as violence from Israeli soldiers and settlers. The overwhelming majority of these incidents go unpunished, and new violations are reported daily.
This violence also affects US citizens in Palestine. Among the first widely reported incidents was Rachel Corrie, an activist who was killed in the Gaza Strip in 2003 while protesting Israel’s demolition of homes. When the bulldozers came to the house where she was staying, Corrie went outside to stop them, wearing a clearly marked fluorescent vest. As she stood in the path of one of the armored bulldozers, the bulldozer crushed her in front of the family whose home she was protecting. In an interview just days before her death, Corrie reflected upon her experience in Gaza, saying, “I feel like what I’m witnessing here is a very systematic destruction of people’s ability to survive. And that is incredibly horrifying.”
In the decades since she was murdered, Rachel Corrie’s parents have advocated for justice.
An Israeli army investigation found Corrie at fault for her own death, claiming that the soldiers in the bulldozer did not see her, and refused to release evidence from the incident. In the two decades since she was murdered, her parents have advocated for justice, even filing a 2010 civil suit in which they sought symbolic compensation of one US dollar and, more important, the Israeli government’s acknowledgment of gross negligence. An Israeli court ruled against them, while the Israeli Supreme Court dismissed the same case in 2015. The US government criticized the Israeli investigation, but took no action. Rachel Corrie’s story is invoked every time an American activist or aid worker is killed in Palestine.
In 2010, Furkan Dogan, a US citizen from Turkey, was killed while aboard the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish aid ship that was part of a flotilla that attempted to break the siege on Gaza. He was shot five times at close range. The US government largely disregarded the incident, preventing an independent investigation and accepting the findings of an Israeli inquiry that found no fault with any of soldiers who took part.
Jacob Flickinger, a dual US-Canadian citizen, was one of the humanitarian workers killed when Israel bombed a World Central Kitchen Convoy in Gaza in 2024. His father said that the US Department of Justice did not even reach out to the family after the attack, saying, “It’s very frustrating. It’s very disheartening…you would think as a US citizen, the United States would take more of an interest in his killing.” The same year, Aysenur Eygi, a US citizen who had just graduated from college, was shot in the head by Israeli forces during a nonviolent demonstration in the West Bank village of Beita. Israel said its forces had killed her “unintentionally.” At a meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Eygi’s husband encountered the same apathy that other families had faced, lamenting, “He [Blinken] was very deferential to the Israelis. It felt like he was saying his hands were tied and they weren’t able to really do much.” Eygi’s family continues to demand justice.
More often, however, the victims are Palestinians—either those who have returned to Palestine after a life in the United States, like Omar Assad, or those merely visiting their families’ homeland. In 2014, Israeli troops shot and killed 14-year-old US citizen Orwa Hammad near Ramallah. In 2016, Florida-born, 16-year-old Mahmoud Shaalan was killed at an Israeli checkpoint on his way to his aunt’s house. In each case, Israeli soldiers justified their actions by claiming the victims had weapons but provided no evidence. Internal Israeli investigations cleared the military’s conduct on both occasions. The United States once again expressed muted concern but ultimately did nothing. Shaalan was buried with the US and Palestinian flags.
Tawfiq Ajaq, a 17-year-old born and raised in Louisiana, came to Palestine in 2023 to visit his family in a village near Ramallah and to “reconnect with their roots.” In January 2024, an Israeli settler began shooting Ajaq in his car and pursued him as he attempted to drive away. Soldiers in an approaching Israeli military vehicle joined in the shooting. Ajaq was hit and his car overturned. The Israeli soldiers prevented an ambulance from reaching him for 15 minutes. Upon arrival at the hospital, Ajaq was dead. “They are using our tax dollars in the US to support the weapons to kill our own children,” his father said. The very next month, Florida-born Mohammad Khdour, age 17, was shot in the head and killed by an Israeli soldier. In response to vague, muted statements by then-secretary of state Antony Blinken, Mohammed’s uncle said “We don’t need talking, man. We need something. We want to see something.”
The next year, killings of Americans—and the impunity afforded to the perpetrators—only continued. In July 2025, Sayfollah Musallet, a 20-year-old from Florida, was visiting relatives in his village near Jerusalem. Israeli settlers beat him to death on the land of his family’s farm. Soldiers blocked ambulances from attending to him for three hours, and when they finally got to him, settlers attacked the paramedics. Known as Saif to his loved ones, Musallet died in his brother’s arms. Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, called on Israel to investigate the incident but offered no public support to the families. There has been no follow-up since.
The most publicized murder of a Palestinian-American was that of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed in May 2022 by Israeli soldiers while reporting on Israeli raids in the West Bank city of Jenin. After shooting her, Israeli soldiers blocked bystanders from attending to her body. Although Israel initially claimed that the lethal shot had come from Palestinian militants, a CNN investigation revealed that there were no Palestinian militants or active combat in the area. Abu Akleh was wearing an identifiable press vest and was standing in a group of journalists when she was shot. Multiple eyewitnesses and video recordings provided evidence that she was killed in a targeted attack. Israeli forces later attacked mourners at her funeral, firing stun grenades indiscriminately.
US citizens killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers rarely receive the bare minimum of an independent investigation for their death.
In a rare occurrence, the United States Government announced that it would investigate Abu Akleh’s murder, a move which Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz repudiated: “I have delivered a message to US representatives that we stand by [Israeli] soldiers, that we will not cooperate with an external investigation, and will not enable intervention to internal investigations.” Israel refused to allow the United States to interview the soldier who had killed Abu Akleh or even to supply his name. Lack of Israeli cooperation meant that the US Department of State resorted simply to observing ballistics tests conducted by Israel and to reviewing information from Palestinian and Israeli investigations. The US investigation consequently faltered. A later investigation by The Guardian later identified the soldier, who had been buried as a hero after he was killed in Jenin a year after Abu Akleh’s murder. The investigation also revealed that the soldier’s colleagues were using pictures of Shireen Abu Akleh for target practice.
Despite a statement from July 2022 that the US State Department “found no reason to believe that [Shireen’s death] was intentional but rather the result of tragic circumstances during an IDF-led military operation,” an investigation in the New York Times in October 2025 reported that a senior US military official involved in the 2022 State Department review believed that the Biden administration had “soft-pedaled [its] findings to appease the Israeli government.”
The pattern is clear. Despite claims in 2023 by then-attorney general Merrick Garland that “we always investigate the deaths of Americans…we are actively investigating the deaths of the Americans using all the tools available to us,” US citizens killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers inevitably never receive the bare minimum of an independent investigation for their death, let alone any accountability for the perpetrators. “The [United States] has created a situation where Israel, a foreign government, can kill US citizens knowing that the US is not going to hold them accountable,” said Maria LaHood, deputy legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Incarceration and Ill Treatment
Months before Sayfollah Musallet was murdered, his family had faced a different kind of trauma. His first cousin, 15-year-old Mohammed Ibrahim, had been detained by Israeli forces since February. Ibrahim, who was born in Florida, was abducted in a night raid from his family’s home near Ramallah, blindfolded with his hands tied behind his back. Since then, he has remained in Israeli military jails on unsubstantiated allegations that he had thrown stones. Ibrahim has been kept from seeing his family and has undergone extended periods without seeing US officials or a lawyer. Ibrahim lives in cold, overcrowded conditions, and has lost significant weight and contracted skin infections. Ibrahim turned 16 in jail. No one has yet been charged over the murder of his cousin.
Several Palestinian-Americans have sued the US government for not evacuating them from Gaza.
In the early days of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, US citizens were under threat there, as well. Several Palestinian-Americans have sued the US government for not evacuating them from Gaza as it had done for US citizens when war broke out in countries such as Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Sudan. After Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, the US government arranged multiple daily charter flights to evacuate US citizens from Israel, as well as for a luxury cruise liner to take some Americans to Cyprus.
More recently, among the 450 participants in the Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza detained by the Israeli government after their ships were intercepted by Israeli force in October 2025 were 21 US citizens. The detainees, who included several US military veterans, described poor detention conditions including overcrowded and poorly ventilated cells, beds infested with bedbugs, no yard time, and denial of hygienic products. Their families called on their congressional representatives for support, and several lawmakers wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, but no public actions were taken. The mother of one of the detained Americans expressed outrage at the lack of US attention given to the plight of her son and the others. She lamented, “The whole United States Senate should have been up in arms…there should have been pressure on [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio and [US Ambassador to Israel Mike] Huckabee. I saw very little.”
Working Toward Accountability
Despite governmental inaction, community efforts to advocate for individual cases have been powerful tools to demand accountability and raise awareness. The US-based human rights organization DAWN recently launched a new tool tracking the status of 13 American citizens killed by Israeli forces or settlers since 2003, and has called on Congress to demand that the Department of State undertake a comprehensive investigation and report of these deaths. More than 100 human-rights, faith, and civil-rights groups have called on Secretary Rubio to work for the release of Mohammed Ibrahim; in September 2025 the Department of State eventually appointed an official to handle his case. On October 21, 2025, 27 members of Congress wrote a letter to Rubio demanding Ibrahim’s immediate release, following a July 2025 letter from 28 US senators, led by Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), calling for investigations into and accountability for the deaths of all US citizens in Palestine. Considering the fragility of the current ceasefire in Gaza and continued US political and financial support of Israel, however, it seems unlikely that Washington will pressure Israel over treatment of civilians in Palestine, even if those civilians are US citizens.
Until Israel faces accountability, this situation will continue. On October 19, 2025, Israeli settlers attacked a group of Palestinians during an olive harvest in the West Bank. An American journalist filmed a masked settler clubbing the head of a 55-year-old Palestinian woman, who was subsequently hospitalized. The journalist described the lack of support from the US government after the attack, saying,
If I am killed in the West Bank, please know that I blame you personally @GovMikeHuckabee. I was set up by the IDF to be attacked by 100 armed settlers. When I sent the embassy the video and asked for protection for me and everyone else in Turmus’ayya [a village in the West Bank with a significant Palestinian-American population], they literally said no.
Americans have long been forced to reckon with their government’s injustices inflicted on citizens on US soil. Today, they must also reckon with the US role in aiding and abetting injustices suffered by its citizens abroad—especially those perpetrated by its allies, including by Israel. The US relationship with Israel must involve a commitment to maintain moral values and to challenge those who violate them, including when Americans are harmed or killed. Without standing up for its own citizens, the US government becomes complicit in their persecution, imprisonment, or death at the hands of the State of Israel.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit:Shutterstock/Ryan Rodrick Beiler