A Hill to Die On

Hafeth Jabbar, Zeyad Kadur, and Kamel Musallet. Photograph courtesy of Jasper Nathaniel.

On a Monday night in mid-September, when I arrived in Washington, D.C., Israel pounded Gaza with air strikes so intense they rattled buildings in Tel Aviv—one of the heaviest bombardments since October 7, 2023. I stopped at my hotel to drop off my bags before meeting the families for dinner. The courtyard was full of people but eerily quiet.

At the café, the barista stood with her back to me.

“Hi,” I said. Nothing. “Hello?”

No response.

“Can I get a coffee, please?”

She still said nothing. At the front desk, it was the same—I spoke, but no one seemed to hear. I wandered into the lobby, unsettled, then noticed the rapid, fluid flicker of hands. I’d unknowingly booked a hotel located on the campus of a university for the deaf and hard of hearing.

I was in the nation’s capital along with a small delegation of American families who were grieving loved ones killed or abducted by Israeli settlers and soldiers. I wanted to see what it was like for them to walk the halls of power and demand justice from a government that has hardly registered their existence. The trip was organized by two NGOs that stacked seventeen meetings across three days—all with Democratic lawmakers—sending us crisscrossing the Hill.

When I met the group at a Mexican restaurant, the three Palestinian American men—Hafeth Abdel Jabbar, Kamel Musallet, and Zeyad Kadur—were housing chips and guac. All three are small-business owners in the U.S.— sneakers, ice cream, and menswear, respectively—who split their time between the States and the West Bank. They were scrolling through the latest grisly footage from Gaza City and passing their phones around. “I watch everything,” Hafeth said. “I have to see it all.” He’s haunted by a clip of an old man picking up a severed hand and slipping it into a bag that reads THANK YOU.

Hafeth is a tall, broad man with a deep, rumbling voice. He raised his family in New Orleans, but in the spring of 2023, they’d decided to spend some time in the West Bank so that his seventeen-year-old son, Tawfic, could feel a deeper connection to their ancestral land. Last January, Hafeth pulled Tawfic’s corpse from the wreckage of his car after he was shot in the head while driving near their home. The Israel Defense Forces put out a statement: something about a stone thrown, a firearm discharged, and an off-duty officer, but Hafeth was sure the bullet came from a soldier’s standard-issue M16. Tawfic had been wearing a North Face jacket and American Eagle jeans. “Made no difference to Biden,” he said. “He never even said my son’s name.”

A year and a half later, in July 2025, Hafeth rushed to a scene of Israeli settlers rampaging in an olive grove just outside al-Mazra’a al-Sharqiya, the hilltop village once mapped by Crusaders and Ottoman taxmen where he and many other Palestinian Americans live. It’s one of the wealthiest towns in the area—the Miami of the West Bank, if Miami were hemmed in by masked marauders who terrorized its outskirts and hunted residents for sport. On that day, locals were saying that a young man had been severely beaten and was struggling to breathe, but settlers and soldiers had been blocking ambulances for more than two hours, shooting through their windshields. Hafeth broke through a line of soldiers and found twenty-year-old Sayfollah “Saif” Musallet, a Palestinian American visiting from Florida, dying under an oak tree on his family’s hillside land. Saif’s father, Kamel, flew in from Florida to bury him. At the funeral, Hafeth put his arm around Kamel. “We fight together,” he told him.

Kamel and Hafeth share no blood, except for what had soaked into Hafeth’s clothes on the day he carried Saif in his arms. Kamel’s cousin, Zeyad, also a Floridian, was in D.C. to plead for support in freeing his nephew, Mohammed Zaher Ibrahim, who has been held in Israeli military detention without charge since February 2025. Zeyad keeps saying Mohammed’s fifteen. He’s actually sixteen—he spent his birthday in jail—but looks barely fourteen. “Just a little guy,” Zeyad told me. “And they sent thirty soldiers to take him from his home at 3 A.M.” In an interrogation video from the night of his abduction, two soldiers in ski masks accuse Mohammed—swaying in a chair, a blindfold loosened around his neck—of throwing rocks at a settler’s car. They offer nothing to back it up, and he keeps repeating that he didn’t do it. His family hasn’t been able to speak with him since, but according to the U.S. embassy, he’s down a third of his body weight and covered in scabies. In the one message he managed to send through the embassy, Mohammed said, “Ask my father to buy my sister a gold necklace and tell him once I’m released, I will work hard to pay him back.” Maybe he meant at the family’s ice cream shop in Tampa; he and Saif were supposed to work side by side there this summer. But Saif is dead, and Mohammed is in prison, unaware, for all the family knows, of what’s happened.

Zeyad ordered three flans that nobody wanted, then quietly picked up the bill. The lead “handler” the NGO had assigned to this trip was beside himself. There were deep bags under Zeyad’s eyes—it was his first trip away from his newborn twins, born six weeks earlier. His wife sent constant updates, which he shared with our group. The babies in a crib. The babies on the floor. Sleeping. Drooling. Murmuring. They named the boy Sayfollah, after their late nephew, and the girl Aiysha, after Ayşenur Eygi, the twenty-six-year-old Turkish American activist killed by an Israeli sniper at a West Bank protest. Ayşenur’s sister, Özden, and her husband, Hamid, were in D.C. to mark the one-year anniversary of her murder.

After Ayşenur was killed, one of her family’s first calls was to Cindy and Craig Corrie. Their daughter Rachel—an activist from Washington State, like Ayşenur—was crushed to death in Gaza in 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer as she stood on a mound of dirt in front of a home to protest its demolition, wearing a reflective orange vest and speaking into a megaphone. She was twenty-three. The Corries had spent more than a decade making fruitless trips to D.C. and Israel in search of accountability—a public records request revealed a Justice Department memo that read, “The family is not going to go away.” But in 2015, they decided to step back; today, they run the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice from Olympia—now a sister city to Rafah, where Rachel was killed—supporting grassroots efforts for human rights locally and globally, and have embraced Özden and Hamid like their own children. Both nearly eighty, Cindy and Craig were back in the country’s capital for the first time in a decade, joining the delegation at the Eygis’ request.

“When Craig and I stepped off the plane into the lobby of the National Airport,” Cindy told me, “a wave of PTSD swept over me.” She paused, then softened: “You know, many good things came out of those trips. But there was a lot of disappointment.”

***

On Tuesday morning, I grabbed an Uber to the House Triangle, where an outdoor press conference hosted by Representative Pramila Jayapal, congresswoman from Washington State, was set to kick off the families’ gauntlet of meetings on Capitol Hill. My driver, a Bangladeshi man, told me the National Guard had mostly dissipated but ICE still prowled certain neighborhoods. He avoided these. “The Guardsmen weren’t so bad,” he said. “ICE, though—real knuckle men.” He paused, caught my eye in the rearview mirror, and corrected himself. “Knuckle draggers?” I nodded. He grinned before turning serious again: a few weeks earlier, a friend and fellow driver had disappeared without a trace.

Dark clouds were rolling in from the Chesapeake, but there was no tent and no backup plan for the presser. One by one, sympathetic lawmakers stepped forward to mourn with the families, who stood behind them holding up signs with their loved ones’ names. They castigated their colleagues for refusing to hold Israel accountable. But the target was elusive: Democrats, Republicans; Biden, Trump; Blinken, Rubio.

Representative Rashida Tlaib, of Michigan, took the podium, and something in the air shifted. In a town defined by careful choreography, her voice was raw. “When Americans are killed abroad, it’s a standard procedure for our U.S. government to open an investigation. But when murderers wear Israeli uniforms,” she said, stabbing the air toward the Capitol, gray and hulking behind her, “there’s complete silence.” She recounted the names of the slain Americans, one by one—none of whose deaths have been investigated by the U.S.—demanding justice for each. “We say enough is enough,” she cried. “We’re standing here because we must honor the lives of our loved ones by demanding that our government stop funding and supporting the Israeli government’s genocide and war crimes.”

The skies opened up. Umbrellas bloomed in the small press pool, irritating the camera crew. People held bags over their heads. A reporter leaned over to a colleague, whispered, “I’ll watch the recording later.”

It was Kamel’s turn to speak. He’s built like a welterweight—compact, sturdy, shoulders set back—with a graying beard on a strong jaw and an aquiline nose. His eyes are light, but he hides them under a dark cap. Rain and wind lashed him as he boasted about Saif—how he had been building his credit score, had bought his first car. Tlaib stepped forward with an umbrella and held it over him.

Hafeth, when he stepped up to the microphone, carried a burning sense of outrage—though his was more incredulous, more combustible, than Tlaib’s, as if he couldn’t fathom how the world hadn’t come to a standstill to demand justice for his son. He stressed his own Americanness, how he had been raised on the promises of liberty and humanity, the very ideals he had tried to pass on to his own children. “So where is my government?” he shouted. There was quiet, scattered applause.

The storm drove steam from the Capitol’s stones as the handlers rushed us to the families’ first meetings. It was gray outside, but inside Cannon—the oldest of the six congressional buildings—the atrium was washed in fluorescent light. The group split up to meet different lawmakers. Hafeth scrolled through X, scanning reactions to his speech. He looked up at no one in particular and snapped, “What the fuck does October 7 have to do with the Israelis killing my son?” Two young staffers in slim-cut suits glanced over, then headed down the corridor.

In the first meeting, I asked a lawmaker—who asked to remain nameless—why she hadn’t voted against sending weapons to Israel. The suited handler who was with us winced, and for the next sixteen meetings, I was exiled to foyers and hallways. There was fury in those rooms, I was told, but out there, it was quiet. A Raphael Warnock staffer read A Little Life (“I was told not to read it with any sharp objects around,” he told me); Bernie’s aides offered me Vermont cheese; a Chuy García staffer asked suspiciously if I was a “David Foster Wallace bro” after hearing the name of my newsletter, Infinite Jaz. I could tell the Republican offices apart from the Democrats’ by the Charlie Kirk memorials tacked up on their doors. On a bench near the cafeteria, what appeared to be a college-age intern had fallen asleep sitting upright.

***

On Wednesday morning, I ducked out to meet a friend and fellow journalist for coffee on Second Street. He’s from Gaza, but he went to university in the West Bank, and when the families came by between meetings, it took less than two minutes for him and Zeyad to figure out they had a mutual friend. We walked together, and Kamel teased me, “We’re only speaking in Arabic so we can talk about you.” The handlers were checking their phones, nudging the pace of the proceedings along.

Kamel wanted to talk about his son. “He had a spark,” he said. “Twenty years old, and he was running the ice cream shop.” He’d turned the Dubai strawberry chocolate cup into an online sensation that drew lines outside the door. The memories pressed out of him, one tumbling over the next. “He wasn’t built like me. I always wanted him to do more push-ups.” He trailed off, revising as he spoke. “I doubt it would have saved him. They probably would’ve killed me, too.” He invited me for shakshouka when I visit the West Bank. We’ll play soccer then, he said—me, him, and his younger son. Inshallah.

We had three umbrellas between the thirteen of us, and we all got soaked through. The lawmakers wedged the families in between their other business. Right after meeting the families in her office, Representative Ayanna Pressley, of Massachusetts, took the House floor to condemn a Republican bill that would let children as young as fourteen be tried as adults. “All these things are connected,” she told the families. “Our children have always been adultified by white supremacists.” Representative García, of Illinois, had just finished tearing into the FBI director Kash Patel over the diversion of agents to immigration enforcement, invoking the killing of one of his own constituents by ICE. Weeks earlier, another of his constituents, Khamis Ayyad, a Palestinian American who lived just blocks away from García, was killed in a settler arson attack while visiting the village of Silwad, a few kilometers south of al-Mazra’a al-Sharqiya. At two o’clock, Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, published a declaration on his website that he believed Israel was committing genocide in Gaza—becoming the first senator to do so—then walked straight into a meeting with the families.

In the Hart Senate Office Building, Hafeth looked up from the foot of a towering sculpture by Alexander Calder, Mountains and Clouds. He traced the mountains with his finger, but the clouds, once dangling from the ceiling, were gone. Officials had feared a steel cloud might fall and crush someone to death on the Capitol floor. Hafeth read the placard—the piece had been installed in 1986, after Calder was dead—then shook his head. “Just imagine—all that work, and he didn’t even live to see it.”

Zeyad stopped at the office of Senator Rick Scott, from his home state of Florida, to study a poster of Israeli hostages from October 7, mounted beside an American flag outside his door. “Why isn’t Mohammed on this?” he asked. “Isn’t he a hostage too?” He grabbed Kamel—also a Florida resident, like his late son, Saif—and they walked into the senator’s office. I tried to follow them in, but a handler stopped me; this wasn’t part of the plan, and she didn’t like the optics. When Zeyad and Kamel reemerged, having been denied a meeting with Scott or even a staffer, I expected anger, but instead they just shook their heads with a kind of dry amusement. “This punk’s been hiding from us for months,” Zeyad said.

The irony, Kamel told me, rolling his eyes, was that his son thought of himself as an American patriot. He played me a voice note Saif sent a month before his death, after the embassy texted him to take shelter during Israel’s exchange of rockets with Iran: “Hell yeah, proud to be an American, trying to keep me safe!” Kamel showed me a video clip: Saif at the airport, waving his U.S. passport at laughing friends, chanting, “Blue is blue!” One shoots back, “You should work for the embassy!”

“You know Huckabee came to my home?” Kamel said of the U.S. ambassador to Israel. “Promised us justice, then we never heard from him again.”

***

It stormed on and off for three straight days as the families trudged between congressional buildings, narrating their grief again and again. A ten-minute Uber cost forty-five dollars; cab lines snaked through lobbies. The Potomac ran down Constitution Avenue, sluiced through shoes. My own oxfords never quite dried, and I had run out of fresh socks.

On the final day, Craig and I got lost in the warren of the Longworth House Office Building’s basement: drab, dimly lit, a Dunkin’ tucked in one corner, and “We the People” from the Constitution stretched across the wall—a black-and-white facsimile of the founding ideals. “I should really know this place better,” Craig said. He can recite every procedural detail of the failed attempts to find justice for Rachel: the IDF’s sham probe; the House resolution for a U.S. investigation that died in committee; the Haifa court’s 2012 “wartime accident” ruling; the Israeli Supreme Court’s 2015 affirmance of that ruling. “But somewhere along the way,” he told me, “I lost an understanding of what justice might be.”

Over the course of the trip, the families had grown closer, and the mission had coalesced around a single urgent hope: that young Mohammed wouldn’t become the next American casualty of Israeli violence. Something, at least, to salvage from the wreckage. “He feels like my little brother,” Özden told Representative Jim McGovern, of Massachusetts. “I can’t do anything for my sister, but we can help him.”

Even in this place of relative helplessness, there was a clear hierarchy of life: citizenship gave the families access that they wouldn’t have otherwise had. Mohammed was abducted along with three other kids who have no representation in D.C. The settler attack that killed Saif took the life of another young man, Mohammed Shalabi, as well. (Race, of course, played a role as well—Rachel’s case, languishing though it was, received far more attention than the Palestinian Americans’ ever would, a fact of which the Corries are deeply aware.)

“It’s always been bigger than Rachel,” Cindy said. “From the beginning, we were seeking accountability for what happened to her, but we also kept in mind what she had asked us to do.”

On the way back to my hotel, I pulled up Rachel’s letters to her mother from Gaza, written in the weeks before she was killed and later published online by her family. “I really can’t believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry about it,” she wrote. “It really hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be.”

She worried she wasn’t finding the right words, that her urgency might sound like exaggeration, that even her mother might not believe her. And then I found the ask Cindy had referred to: “I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don’t think it’s an extremist thing to do anymore.”

***

A week after the trip, I called Kamel, who was back in Florida, to ask if he thought it had been productive.

“No,” he said. “It was only the Democrats who met with us, and the ones who are already critical of Israel. So they’re listening, and they’re saying all the right things, and they’re even asking, ‘What can I do for you?’ But in the end, it’s always: ‘Actually, there’s nothing we can do for you. We’re too weak.’ ”

He hoped there’d be some momentum to get Mohammed out—and that would be a blessing—but he expected nothing in the way of justice for his own son.

“If they couldn’t get justice for Rachel after twenty years,” he said, “what are they going to do for a boy named Sayfollah?”

While he was in D.C., he told me, settlers had broken into his neighbor’s farmhouse and were now occupying it, giving them a strategic position to launch more attacks from the top of the hill the village is built on. “They murdered my son,” he said, “and now the same settlers are coming back day after day, shooting at us, scaring our children, stealing our land. They’re living on our property now. Do you understand how crazy that is? Nobody should have to live like this, American or not.”

He sounded tired. I asked how he was holding up.

“It was nice being with everybody,” he said. “But then I got on the plane, and it came out of nowhere. The sadness, man, it hit me like a wave. I didn’t want people to see me. They don’t know what the hell you’re crying for. I always wear a hat to hide it, but I couldn’t this time. So I just found four seats that were empty in the back of the plane, and I just cried, man. I cried the whole way.”

 

Jasper Nathaniel is a Brooklyn-based writer and reporter. He covers Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and other political and cultural affairs on his Substack, Infinite Jaz .