Useful information
Prime News delivers timely, accurate news and insights on global events, politics, business, and technology
Sayfollah Musallet was a brother, a son and an ambitious young man who was at the beginning of his life.
That is the message that his family has repeated since July 11, when the 20 -year -old Israeli settlers were destroyed until death by Israeli settlers in the Sinjil village in occupied West Bank.
That expects that message prevents Sayfollah, born in Florida, to become “another number” in the growing list of Palestinian Americans whose murders are never just justice.
That is why his cousin, Fatmah Muhammad, took a moment in the midst of his pain on Wednesday to remember the things he loved with Sayfollah.
The two joined a passion for food, and Muhammad, a professional baker, remembers how carefully Sayfollah would serve the delicate knafeh mass that he sold through the ice cream shop he directed in Tampa.
“Only in the way he placed my dessert, made him look so well,” Muhammad recalled, 43. “I even told him that he did a better job than me.”
“That really showed the type of person that was,” he added. “I wanted to do things with excellence.”
‘The love that gave us all’
Born and raised in Port Charlotte, a coastal community in the south of Florida Central, Sayfollah, nicknamed Saif, maintained a deep connection with its ancestral roots abroad.
A large part of his adolescence passed in the busy West Bank, where his two brothers and sister also lived. There, their parents, who have a house near Sinjil, hope that they could connect better with their culture and language.
But after finishing high school, Sayfollah was anxious to return to the United States to try their luck in entrepreneurship. Last year, he, his father and cousins opened the dessert store in Tampa, Florida, playfully called Ice Screamin.
But the ice cream shop was just the beginning. Sayfollah’s ambition left a deep impression on Muhammad.
“He had his vision of expanding the business, to multiply it by many,” he said, his voice sometimes trembling with pain. “This at 20, when most children play video games.”
“And the crazy is that any goal that he produced, always did,” he added. “He always exceeded everyone’s expectations, especially with the love he gave us all.”
Sayfollah’s aunt, Samera Musallet, 58, also remembers her dedication to her family. She described Sayfollah as a young loving who never let her aunts pay anything in her presence, and always insisted on bringing dessert when he came to dinner.
At the same time, Samera said she was still young and fun of fun: she liked watching comedy movies, buying clothes and making night trips to Wawa’s convenience store.
One of his best memories occurred when Sayfollah was only 14 years old, and went together to a baseball game with Kansas City’s real ones.
“When we got there, you could smell the popcorn and all the hot dogs. He bought everything he could see and said: ‘Let’s share!'” He told Al Jazeera.
“After eating all that junk food, we turned around and he was sleeping. I woke it up when the game ended, and he says: ‘Who won?'”
‘I really want to marry’
Another of his aunts, Katie Salameh, 52, remembers that Sayfollah’s mind had resorted to marriage in the last months of his young life.
When Florida spring gave way to summer, Sayfollah had announced plans to return to the West Bank to see her mother and brothers. But he entrusted Salameh that he had another reason to return.
“The last time I saw him was that we had a family wedding, and that was the weekend of the Fallen Day (in May),” Salameh told Al Jazeera.
“I asked: ‘Are you so excited to see your brothers and your mother?’ He said: ‘My God, I’m so excited.’
To maintain the ice cream shop without problems, Sayfollah had organized a change with his father: he would return to the West Bank while his father would travel to Tampa to take care of the business.
But that decision would not know Sayfollah’s father to more than 10,000 kilometers from his son when the violent Israeli settlers surrounded him, since the witnesses and his family would then count.
The Israeli authorities said that the attack in Sinjil began with the launch of rocks and the “violent confrontations … between Palestinians and Israeli civilians”, a claim that the family says and the witnesses have rejected.
Instead, they said Sayfollah was trying to protect the land of his family when he was surrounded by a “many settlers” that beat him.
Even when it was called an ambulance, Sayfollah’s family said the settlers prevented the paramedics from reaching their broken body. Sayfollah’s younger brother would finally help bring his dying brother to emergency responders.
The settlers also fatally shot Mohammed al-Shalabi, a 23-year-old Palestinian man, who witnesses, according to witnesses, let himself bleed for hours.
“His phone was on, and he was not responding,” said his mother, Joumana Al-Shalabi, to journalists. “He was missing for six hours. They found him martyred under the tree. He was hit and shot with bullets.”
Palestinians cannot legally own firearms in occupied West Bank, but Israeli settlers can. The Israeli government itself has encouraged settlers to have weapons, even through the distribution of rifles to civilians.
The Office of the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner (OHCHR) has registered the murders of at least 964 Palestinians at the hands of Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank occupied since October 7, 2023.
And violence seems to be increasing. The OHCHR said there was a 13 percent increase in the number of murders during the first six months of 2025, compared to the same period last year.
‘I can’t even describe pain’
An Al Jazeera analysis also found that Israeli forces and settlers have killed at least nine US citizens since 2022, including veteran reporter Shireen Abu Akleh.
None of those deaths has resulted in criminal positions, since Washington usually depends on Israel to carry out their own investigations.
Until now, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, has not directly approached the murder of Sayfollah. When asked in the Oval office about the fatal beating, Trump postponed the Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“We protect all American citizens anywhere in the world, especially if they are unfairly killed or killed,” Rubio replied on the name of Trump. “We are collecting more information.”
Rubio also pointed out a statement Issued a day before from the United States ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. The ambassador asked Israel to “aggressively investigate” the attack, saying “there must be responsibility for this criminal and terrorist act.”
It was a particularly discordant feeling of Huckabee, who has been a vocal defender of Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank and has even denied the very existence of a Palestinian people.
However, no independent investigation led by the United States has been announced.
According to Israeli media, three Israeli settlers, including a military reservist, were arrested after the deadly attack, but all were subsequently released.
Only four days have passed since Sayfollah’s murder, and his family told Al Jazeera that the initial shock has only begun to dissipate.
But instead an avalanche of pain and anger has arrived. Muhammad still struggles to accept that “he died because he was in his own land.” She sees the death of Sayfollah as part of a broader pattern of abuse, either in the West Bank or in Gaza, where Israel has led a war since 2023.
“I see it in the news all the time with other people in the West Bank. I see it in Gaza, the indiscriminate murder of anyone in their own way,” he said.
“But when it happens to you, it is very difficult to even understand,” he added. “It’s pain that I can’t even describe.”
