Assad Assad says he and his family feel betrayed.
But more than that, the Palestinian American said his first reaction to the United States government’s decision to continue funding an Israeli army unit that bound his elderly uncle and left him for dead could be summed up in a single word: “devastation”.
“We see this [as] hypocrisy — a US government that allows a foreign entity to have this opportunity to kill,” Assad, 36, told Al Jazeera in a phone interview from his home in the state of Wisconsin.
“They murdered my uncle in cold blood. My uncle was not armed, was not…,” he continued, his voice trailing off. “He was just going home from a night with his friends, his cousins, playing a card game.”
Omar Assad, a 78-year-old Palestinian American, died in January 2022 after he was detained by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint in his home village of Jiljilya, near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
He was forced out of his car and then gagged, blindfolded and dragged on the ground, according to witness accounts and his family. He became unresponsive, and the soldiers left him out in the cold at a construction site without any assistance or medical care.
An autopsy later found that he had died of a heart attack “due to the external violence he was exposed to”.
His death prompted widespread condemnation, and the Assad family and Palestinian rights advocates in the US have called on President Joe Biden’s administration to conduct an independent investigation and ensure Israel is held accountable.
Those calls grew louder after the Israeli army said in 2023 that soldiers involved in the incident had been disciplined but none would face criminal charges.
In April of this year, the US State Department said it was looking into whether to sanction the Israeli military battalion that had detained Omar Assad — the Netzah Yehuda Battalion — which is notorious for abuses in the West Bank.
