Americans keep getting killed in the West Bank. Here’s how the US could fight that awful trend

Mourners carry the body of dual U.S.-Palestinian citizen Saif Musalat during his funeral in the Palestinian village of Al-Mazraa Al-Sharqiya in the West Bank on July 13, after he was reportedly killed by Israeli settlers two days prior. Photo by Zain Jaafar / AFP via Getty Images

Senior Columnist Rob Eshman July 18, 2025

Yet another American was killed by Israeli settlers in the West Bank last week. It’s just one more death that’s too likely to go uninvestigated. One more alleged murder that we have too many reasons to believe will go unpunished.

The West Bank may be one of the only places in the world where there is no logical conclusion other than that American lives are cheap. American Palestinian lives, that is.

But there might be a legal way to exact a price for American lives cut short. A legal mechanism to hold at least some of these perpetrators accountable — if they themselves are Americans.

The latest victim is Saif Musallet, a 20-year-old American citizen, born and raised in Florida, who was killed last week in a confrontation with Jewish settlers while visiting relatives in Sinjil, a village north of Ramallah.

Settlers beat Musallet to death last Friday evening, according to his family. His father told CNN that the IDF prevented medical help from reaching him for hours. Musallet died on his way to the hospital.

On Tuesday, United States Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called for an “aggressive investigation” into Musallet’s death, the circumstances of which remain unclear. Witnesses say Palestinians protested when settlers came onto their land. Some threw rocks. In response, they say, a group of settlers ran up a hillside, where they surrounded and beat Musallet.

The IDF said it will probe the circumstances of Musallet’s death. But let’s be real: If past performance is any indication of future results, nothing will happen. After all, no criminal charges, or American consequences of any clear kind, followed the recent killings of four other American citizens by Israeli forces or settlers in the region.

On Jan. 19, 2024, settlers opened fire on Palestinians in a pickup truck in the West Bank, killing Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, a 17-year-old student who had moved with his family from Louisiana nine months earlier to learn more about his Palestinian heritage.

Despite assurances of an IDF investigation, no one was charged in Jabbar’s killing.

In September, Mohhamad Khdour, also 17 and also from Florida, was driving home from a picnic with friends when a settlement guard opened fire from the other side of a border fence, and shot Khdour in the head.

The U.S. Embassy expressed condolences. The State Department and former President Joe Biden’s White House demanded answers. The Israelis promised an investigation. Nada.

Following Khdour’s murder, three serving U.S. government attorneys accused the Department of Justice of a “glaring gap” in upholding U.S. laws in cases in which Israeli military forces or civilians have allegedly killed American citizens. In addition to Khdour and Abdel Jabbar, they cited the cases of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a 26-year-old Turkish-American student shot last year by Israelis during a West Bank protest; Omar Assad, a 78-year-old Palestinian American who died in 2022 while detained by Israeli troops; and Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian-American journalist shot by Israeli troops while covering a protest in 2022.

Their families have demanded that U.S. authorities pressure Israel to investigate and hold accountable any soldier or civilian responsible for their deaths.

It also cites the cases of American aid worker Jacob Flickinger, killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, and Kamel Ahmad Jawad, a U.S. citizen killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon.

The Justice Department filed terrorism charges against Hamas leaders for their role in the deaths of at least 40 Americans on Oct. 7. It has yet to file any charges against Israelis in the deaths of Americans in the West Bank.

Israel has long made a practice of turning a blind eye to settler violence. Between 2005 and 2022, according to the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, only 7% of Israeli police investigations of settler violence led to an indictment, and only 3% led to a conviction.

In the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack, the problem has exploded, with the IDF and the Israeli police reporting 50 nationalist attacks per month by Israeli settlers against Palestinians.

No wonder, then, that these American deaths occurred. But why has the U.S., Israel’s most important ally, allowed these murders to go on with little more than condolence cards to the families?

There’s one clear route the U.S. could take toward enforcing actual consequences for these killings: Prosecuting Americans who participate in the killing of other Americans.

The primary responsibility for investigating and prosecuting homicides typically rests with the law enforcement authorities of the country where the homicide occurred. But there is case law and legal precedent, as well as a law on the books — 18 U.S.C. § 1119 — for the government getting involved if a U.S. national murders another U.S. national abroad.

Earlier this year, for example, prosecutors in New York arrested a Bronx man, Ganet Rozario, and charged him with the murder of a U.S. national on foreign soil, specifically, in Bangladesh.

“The message is clear: this office and its partners will be relentless in our pursuit of anyone who takes another life, even overseas,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams in announcing the arrest.

That’s how to do it. The U.S. can ask Israeli authorities to identify American citizens involved in any way in the killing of these Palestinians, and hold them accountable in U.S. courts.

Of the estimated 200,000 Americans living in Israel with dual citizenship, tens of thousands live in the West Bank. In fact, about 10% of Americans who move to Israel end up living in the West Bank, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics 2021 numbers.

Whether any have been involved in the latest deadly incidents is unclear, but it wouldn’t be without precedent.

“Baruch Goldstein was only one of several American-Israeli assailants that have perpetrated acts of terror against Palestinians,” writes Sara Yael Hirschhorn in her study of American Jewish settlers, City on a Hilltop.

Goldstein was the Brooklyn-raised doctor who gunned down 29 Palestinian worshippers, and injured over 125 others, at the Tomb of the Patriarchs / Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron on Feb. 25, 1994.

Hirschorn devotes a chapter of her must-read book to tracing the rise of terror and vigilantism among American-born settlers, many of whom were inspired by the teachings of the Brooklyn-born Rabbi Meir Kahane.

“The vast majority of Jewish-American settlers have found the pen mightier than the sword, but some of those who have turned to terrorism have perversely seen their activities as being within the tradition of sacred bloodshed,” she writes.

Again, it’s not clear that any dual citizens are involved in the recent killings — none has been identified or accused. But it’s not inconceivable, and if that did turn out to be the case, trying the perpetrators in American courts is one lever the U.S. could pull in seeking justice for its murdered citizens.

Admittedly, success would be a long shot.

“There’d be both legal and jurisdictional complexities to do that,” said Rabbi Mark Goldfeder, a lawyer and CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, which fights antisemitism in the courts.

Goldfeder pointed out that in cases where these prosecutions successfully take place, the countries where the murders happened lack truly functional legal systems — unlike Israel.

“You’d have to have a case where Israel literally declines to prosecute someone who kills somebody else,” he said, which is “not likely.”

“They’re a fully functioning democracy with a robust legal system.”

The law states that the U.S. can’t prosecute a case if Israel has already done so. But, as we’ve established, many of these crimes go uninvestigated, much less prosecuted.

Prosecution, according to the law, requires approval from the foreign country’s attorney general or a designated official, which means politics comes into play. “The bottom line is, you’ve got to have the top echelons of the government agreeing to do this, which means it’s all based on reacting to political pressure and the news,” said Stephen M. Komie, a Chicago criminal lawyer who has worked on many international cases. “Because this is not going to happen in the ordinary case.”

The political pressure starts with a public outrage.

“You’d have to have a human interest story that brings tears to the eyes of the voters,” Komie said.

The unanswered-for deaths of these American men and women, I think, certainly reaches that bar.

Even one successful prosecution of a U.S. citizen involved in the murder of an American in the West Bank would send the signal that to the U.S., no citizen is above the law, no perpetrator is beyond justice — and no one life is less precious than another.