Sayfollah Musallet was an ambitious brother, son and young man who was just at the start of his life.
This is the message that his family has repeated since July 11, when the 20 -year -old American citizen was beaten to death by Israeli settlers in the village of Sinjil in occupied West Bank.
This message, they hope, will prevent the original Sayfollah from Florida from becoming “just another number” in the growing list of Palestinian Americans whose murders never find justice.
This is why his cousin, Fatmah Muhammad, took a moment in the middle of her sorrow on Wednesday to remember the things she loved about Sayfollah.
The two united on a passion for food, and Muhammad, a professional baker, remembers what point Sayfollah would be used carefully at the delicate Knafeh pastry that she sold via the ice cream store which he ran to Tampa.
“Right in the way he plated my dessert, he made things so beautiful,” recalls Muhammad, 43. “I even told him that he had done a better job than me.”
“It really showed the type of person he was,” she added. “He wanted to do things with excellence.”
‘The love he gave us all’
Born and raised in Port Charlotte, a coastal community of the Florida Center -South, Sayfollah – nicknamed Saif – has maintained a deep link with its ancestral roots abroad.
He spent a large part of his adolescence in occupied West Bank, where his two brothers and sister also lived. There, his parents, who have a house near Sinjil, hoped that he could better connect with his culture and his language.
But after completing his secondary studies, Sayfollah was impatient to return to the United States to try entrepreneurship. Last year, his father and his cousins opened the dessert shop in Tampa, Florida, named Ice Screamin.
But the ice cream store was just the start. Sayfollah’s ambition has left a deep impression on Muhammad.
“He had his vision of expanding the business, of multiplying it by many,” she said, his voice sometimes trembling with sorrow. “It is 20 years old, while most children play video games.”
“And what is crazy is that any objective he decided, he has always done it,” she added. “He has always gone over everyone’s expectations, especially with the love he gave us all.”
The aunt of Sayfollah, Samera Musallet, 58, also remembers her dedication to her family. She described Sayfollah as a young man who has never let her aunts pay anything in his presence – and who has always insisted on bringing a dessert when he came to dinner.
At the same time, Samera said he was still young and fun: he liked to watch comedy movies, shop for clothing and make trips at the end of the evening at the Wawa convenience store.
One of his most beautiful memories came when Sayfollah was only 14 years old, and they went together to a baseball match featuring the Royals of Kansas City and the Rays of Tampa Bay.
“When we arrived, he could feel the popcorn and all the hot dogs. He bought everything he could see and said:” We are going to share! “” She told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“After eating all this junk food, we turned around and he was sleeping. I woke him up when the match was over, and he said:” Who won? “”
‘I really want to get married’
Another of her aunts, Katie Salameh, 52, remembers that the spirit of Sayfollah had turned into marriage in the last months of her young life
While Florida’s spring has given way to the summer, Sayfollah had announced his intention to return to the West Bank to see his mother and his brothers and sisters. But he told Salameh that he had another reason to come back.
“The last time I saw it, we had a family wedding, and it was the weekend of the Memorial Day (in May),” Salameh told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“I asked him,” Are you so excited to see your brothers and sisters and your mom? ” He said, “Oh my God, I am so excited.” Then he said, “I really want to get married.
For the ice cream store to work well, Sayfollah had organized a switch with his father: he would return to the West Bank while his father would go to Tampa in mind.
But this decision involuntarily put Sayfollah’s father over 10,000 kilometers from his son when violent Israeli settlers surrounded him, as witnesses and his family would tell later.
The Israeli authorities said that Sinjil’s attack began with the launch of Roche and the “violent clashes … Between the Palestinians and the Israeli civilians”, an affirmation that the family and the witnesses of Sayfollah rejected.
Instead, they said Sayfollah was trying to protect the land from his family when he was surrounded by a “crowd of settlers” who beat him.
Even when an ambulance was called, the Sayfollah family said that the colonists prevented paramedical paramedics from reaching their broken body. Sayfollah’s younger brother would finally help carry his dying brother to emergency stakeholders.
The colonists also fatally killed Mohammed Al-Shalabi, a 23-year-old Palestinian, who said that witnesses have been left for bleeding for hours.
“His phone was on and he didn’t answer,” his mother told Joumana Al-Shalabi, to journalists. “It was missing for six hours. They found it martyred under the tree. They beat him and pulled him with bullets. ”
Palestinians cannot legally have firearms in occupied West Bank, but Israeli settlers can. The Israeli government itself encouraged the colonists to wear weapons, including the distribution of civilians to civilians.
The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHC) recorded the killings of at least 964 Palestinians in the hands of Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank since October 7, 2023.
And violence seems to be increasing. The OHCHR noted that there had been a 13% increase in the number of murders in the first six months of 2025, compared to the same period last year.
‘Pain that I can’t even describe’
An analysis by Tel Aviv Tribune also revealed that Israeli forces and settlers have killed at least nine American citizens since 2022, including veteran Shireen Abu Akleh.
None of these deaths resulted in criminal charges, Washington generally relying on Israel to conduct his own investigations.
So far, US President Donald Trump has not directly addressed the murder of Sayfollah. When asked in the Oval Office of Mortal Studies, Trump went to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“We protect all American citizens all over the world, especially if they are unjustly murdered or killed,” replied Rubio on behalf of Trump. “We collect more information.”
Rubio also underlined a statement published one day earlier from the American ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. The ambassador called Israel to “investigate the attack aggressively”, claiming “that there must be a responsibility for this criminal and terrorist act”.
It was a particularly shocking feeling of Huckabee, who was a vocal supporter of the illegal colonies of Israel in the West Bank and 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 placed in police custody after the deadly attack, but all were then released.
It’s only four days for the murder of Sayfollah, and his family told Tel Aviv Tribune that the initial shock had only started to dissipate.
But in his place came a flood of sorrow and anger. Muhammad still finds it difficult to accept that he “died because he was on his own land”. She sees the death of Sayfollah as part of a broader model of abuse, whether in the West Bank or Gaza, where Israel has waged a war since 2023.
“I see it all the time with other people in the West Bank. I see him in Gaza-the blind murder of anyone on their way, “she said.
“But when it happens to you, it is so difficult to understand even,” she added. “This is a pain that I can’t even describe.”
