An Israeli settler sanctioned by the Biden administration has been arrested in the killing of a well-known Palestinian activist in the West Bank.
Local outlets and The New York Times reported Tuesday that police named Yinon Levi as the suspect in the shooting of Awdah Hathaleen, a journalist from the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair whose work was featured in the Academy Award-winning documentary “No Other Land.”
Levi, whose U.S. sanctions were lifted by President Donald Trump in January, was detained and released on house arrest, police said. No formal charges have been brought against him yet, The Guardian reported.
His confrontation Monday with Palestinians, set off by Levi and a colleague bulldozing a path through the the fields of Umm al-Khair to expand the Israeli settlement of Carmel, was captured on video and showed him firing multiple times. In statements reported by the Times, Levi’s lawyer said his client was shooting into the air, acting in self-defense in response to Palestinians hurling stones at him.
Maya Alleruzzo/Associated Press
Hathaleen was not involved in the dispute and was standing at a community center about 150 feet away when he was hit by the stray bullet, his cousin and another activist told the Times.
Levi was one of four Israelis whom President Joe Biden’s State Department brought financial sanctions against last year, saying he’d led settler groups “that assaulted Palestinian and Bedouin civilians, threatened them with additional violence if they did not leave their homes, burned their fields and destroyed their property.”
The move locked Levi out of the international economic system and froze his Israeli bank accounts.
He denied any wrongdoing to to ABC News at the time.
“When we first found out about it, we thought it was a joke. Why would Biden care about us?” he said.
“Anarchists come to our territory and do provocations. They disturb the soldiers, they attack us, the dog and the sheep on purpose and document it for provocation,” he continued.
Courtesy of Awdah Hathaleen
Levi was also sanctioned by the European Union last year as an “extremist settler” who’s “responsible for serious human rights abuses against Palestinians.” The U.K. also brought sanctions against him, saying he “used physical aggression, threatened families at gunpoint, and destroyed property as part of a targeted and calculated effort to displace Palestinian communities.”
Hathaleen, whose work documented the forced expulsions and demolitions in the West Bank, was mourned by the filmmakers involved in “No Other Land,” which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature Film this year.
“My dear friend Awdah was slaughtered this evening,” Basel Adra, the film’s Palestinian co-director, wrote on social media. “He was standing in front of the community centre in his village when a settler fired a bullet that pierced his chest and took his life. This is how Israel erases us — one life at a time.”
