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nasrallah abu siyam
The All Too Ordinary Death of Nasrallah Abu Siyam
What happened to Nasrallah was not unusual; in fact, it was entirely predictable. It reflects a pattern Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank have been forced to live with for decades.
Feb 26, 2026
I’ve grown accustomed to the violence in Palestine; to seeing my brothers and sisters stripped from their homes and taken away from life itself. That violence has always felt close. And yet, with Nasrallah Abu Siyam, it became unmistakable.
Not only was he my age, he was born just miles from my hometown. An American citizen. Living an ordinary life. Dreaming of ordinary things. And still, he was shot and killed by Israeli settlers, simply for helping guard his fam ily’s livestock in the occupied West Bank.
In nearly every way, his life mirrored mine. The only difference was where he stood. And that difference, it seems, was enough.
What happened to Nasrallah was not unusual; in fact, it was entirely predictable. It reflects a pattern Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank have been forced to live with for decades—one in which violence is routine, accountability is absent, and loss is absorbed without consequence.
Nasrallah Abu Siyam lived an ordinary life. He should have been afforded the ordinary right to keep it.
That pattern is clearest in how these moments of violence unfold. In Mukhmas, the village where Nasrallah was killed, a resident described what happened plainly:
“When the settlers saw the army, they were encouraged and started shooting live bullets.”
In other words, the presence of the occupying forces did not interrupt the violence; it emboldened it. This is a reality Palestinians have long understood— that the forces ostensibly tasked with “maintaining order” often function instead as a mechanism for enabling and inflicting violence.
Time and time again, Palestinians are left to bury the result.The scale of that violence is not abstract, nor is it disputed.
Between October 2023 and October 2025 alone, more than 1,100 Palestinians were killed in the occupied West Bank by Israeli forces and settlers—229 of them children. That means more than 1 in 5 of those killed were children. In that same span of time, over 10,900 Palestinians were wounded and nearly 21,000 were detained.
And yet, none of this devastation takes place on a battlefield. There is no armed group to point to, no battle to cite. What remains is an occupied territory where civilian death, injury, and detention occur as a matter of policy and practice—not as rare or exceptional events.
By this point, it may sound like a broken record—not just from me, but from years of warnings repeating what the international community has recorded and then promptly ignored. But repetition becomes inevitable when impunity is preserved at every level.
Impunity—that, I must say—does not exist in a vacuum. It is sustained through material support, political protection, and deliberate silence. All of which the United States is deeply embedded in: in the weapons supplied, in the cover extended, and in what goes unsaid. When Americans like Nasrallah Abu Siyam—at least six of them in the past two years—are killed under an occupation supported by US authority, and little is said and less is done, that silence becomes a statement in itself.
Put simply, it is a statement of how Palestinian life—American or not—is weighed, and how little that weight has meant in the political world.
No power should have the authority to dictate which lives are expendable—and which are not. Nasrallah Abu Siyam lived an ordinary life. He should have been afforded the ordinary right to keep it. But again, that failure is not abstract. It has a name, a place, and a date.
This piece was originally published on Substack.
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Huckabee Accused of Inciting Murder After Israeli Settlers Kill Palestinian-American Teen
"The US ambassador to Israel is engaging in empowering and allowing for actions that lead to the targeted lynching and killing of US citizens," said one group.
Feb 23, 2026
Human rights defenders this week accused US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee—who recently endorsed Israel conquering much of the Middle East—of inciting deadly violence after Israeli colonists in the illegally occupied West Bank of Palestine fatally shot a Palestinian-American teenager who was trying to stop settlers from stealing livestock.
Nasrallah Abu Siyam, 19, was shot dead last Wednesday by a masked Israeli settler armed with an M-16 rifle in the village of Mukhmas, where the 19-year-old Philadelphia native had been living and helping his father, Mohammed Abu Siyam, tend the family's livestock and cultivate their olive trees.
According to eyewitness accounts as reported by independent New York journalist and Palestine specialist Jasper Diamond Nathaniel:
At least four other local Palestinians were wounded by settler gunfire during the invasion of the village, including another young man whose foot may be amputated. Some were shot while carrying the wounded to safety. Many others were severely beaten with metal rods. Israeli soldiers, who accompanied the settlers into the village, responded to the shooting rampage by firing stun grenades and tear gas into the residential area, burning an elderly man. When it was over, settlers walked off with more than 300 of the village’s sheep and goats under the military’s watch. It was the first full day of Ramadan. As of this writing, no one has been arrested.
While human rights groups and some Democratic US lawmakers have called for a full investigation into Abu Siyam's killing, Huckabee has so far been silent. Last July, Huckabee responded to Israeli settlers' killing of 23-year-old Palestinian-American Sayfollah Musallet, who was beaten to death while visiting relatives in the West Bank, as "a criminal and terrorist act" that Israeli authorities should "aggressively investigate." As is usually the case when Israeli settlers kill Palestinians, no one has been charged for killing Musallet.
Last Friday, Huckabee—who during his ill-fated 2008 presidential campaign denied the very existence of the Palestinian people—sat for an interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson during which he backed the realization of a so-called “Greater Israel” stretching from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq, saying that "it would be fine" if Israel "took it all," as many Jews and Evangelical Christians believe their common deity figure "God" intended them to do.
Numerous observers said the envoy's remarks inherently endorsed violence and forced displacement akin to what's happening to Palestinians living under occupation, colonization, ethnic cleansing, apartheid—and in the case of Gaza, genocide.
"Shortly after the lynching murder of an American citizen, footage aired of the US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee justifying the very structure of occupation, and rhetoric of ethnic cleansing, that led to the murder and continuing attacks on the occupied West Bank," the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) said in a statement Monday.
ADC said Huckabee's endorsement of Greater Israel "signals permission and the green light for Israeli forces to use violence and empower settlers for further annexation and dispossession."
The group continued:
The United States continues to fund, shield, and excuse Israeli violence, forced displacement, and mass atrocity across Palestine. Now the US ambassador to Israel is engaging in empowering and allowing for actions that lead to the targeted lynching and killing of US citizens. At the same time, Congress continues to put Israel first by sending American taxpayer dollars to Israel.
Israeli settlers and soldiers have killed at least a dozen Americans since 2022. Time and again, our government refuses to defend the rights, dignity, and safety of its own citizens simply to appease the demands of a foreign government and give impunity to Israel.
"The impunity cannot continue," ADC added.
Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a fugitive from the International Criminal Court wanted for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza—have publicly declared their support for Greater Israel, sparking widespread condemnation throughout the Arab world and beyond.
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