TURMUS AYYA, West Bank — To his family, Amer Rabee was just a 14-year-old American boy picking almonds with two friends.
But to the Israeli soldiers who gunned him down on Sunday night, the trio were “three terrorists” who were “endangering civilians” by throwing rocks at cars. The hail of bullets the soldiers fired over the next several minutes succeeded in “eliminating one terrorist and hitting two additional terrorists,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement Tuesday.
Now, as the village of Turmus Ayya, which has a large number of U.S. citizens, mourns the loss of one of its children — whose family insists had neither violent tendencies nor political allegiances — it’s grappling with a deeper question: why President Donald Trump and the U.S. government have said so little about the killing of one of its citizens.
Amer was “an American citizen,” Mohammed Rabee, 28, said Thursday about his cousin, who grew up in Saddle Brook, New Jersey. “He thought his passport came with freedom and American protection, but it clearly didn’t.”
“Our president hasn’t shed a light on this,” he added.
Mohammed and other family members spoke to NBC News on the third day of mourning for Amer at one of Turmus Ayya’s municipal buildings, where townspeople shuffled through to offer their condolences, sipped coffee and smoked cigarettes before dining on a lamb and rice lunch.
Describing Amer, the youngest of five siblings, as “very intelligent,” Amer’s father Mohammed Rabee, 48, said he had “no problems” with anyone in the West Bank, where the family moved to in 2013. He added that Amer had plenty of friends back home in the U.S. who he kept in contact with over the phone and through his gaming console.
As soon as he heard his son was involved in a shooting, he said he tried to contact the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, hoping it would intervene or provide medical help.
The process of identifying himself and his son took too long, Mohammed said, and he begged the State Department official on the other end of the line to contact the IDF to ask it to hold its fire. NBC News has asked the embassy for comment.
The following day, hours after his son had been killed, the embassy called Mohammed back to follow up, he said.
“I told them he’s already dead, so what can you do now?” Mohammed said.
The same day, the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem released a statement acknowledging that an American citizen had been killed and offered “our sincerest condolences to the family on their loss.”
But Amer’s family, along with other residents of Turmus Ayya, said they wanted to hear from Trump, who did not mention him at a meeting in the Oval Office with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netnayahu the day after his death, even as he held forth on the plight of remaining hostages in the Gaza Strip.
“We have a U.S. citizen, a child, who was murdered in cold blood,” said Yaser Alkam, the head of the Turmus Ayya’s municipality. “Why should we not be treated equally as any other American?”
The Trump administration has been “fighting for the release of one of the American hostages in Gaza,” said Alkam, referring to Edan Alexander, a 21-year-old Israeli American soldier who grew up in the U.S.
After the Trump administration took power, it broke long-standing diplomatic protocol and started negotiating directly with Hamas to try to free Alexander — thought to be the last living American hostage in the enclave — and secure the release of the bodies of four other Israeli Americans in Gaza.
Like Amer’s family and many of the other residents in the village dubbed “little America” by Palestinians, Alkam said he has dual citizenship and divides his time between the West Bank and the U.S.
Turmus Ayya is the ancestral homeland for thousands of Palestinian Americans, many of whose ancestors immigrated to the United States decades ago. Their descendants return to inherited property in the town — homes, businesses and farms that allow residents to keep their feet in both cultures.
But even though many storefront signs in Turmus Ayya are written in English and pizza places are as common as shawarma stands, the town is fraught with danger.
Settler violence in the West Bank, including incursions into occupied territory and raids, has intensified since the start of Israel’s war in Gaza that has killed over 50,500 people there, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run enclave. The Israeli onslaught in Gaza followed a Hamas terror attack on Oct. 7, 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and about 250 taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies.
In an update late last month, the United Nations humanitarian affairs office said Israeli forces had killed 99 Palestinians this year in the West Bank.
In Turmus Ayya, villagers showed NBC News videos from security cameras of young men rampaging through the town committing violent acts of vandalism. NBC News could not independently verify that the footage was of Israeli settlers.
Amer’s father, Mohammed, said settlers burned down one of the family’s vacation homes outside the village. He added that he regularly warns his sons not to venture to the outskirts for fear of settler attacks, even tracking their movements on a cellphone app.
Many of the uniformed soldiers are settlers themselves, deputized by the armed forces to carry and use firearms as a kind of local law enforcement.
“The reason why all this aggression happens is because they want to push out and take our land,” said Amer’s older brother Saad. “Us just being here, simply existing on this land, is an act of resistance, and it pushes back their illegal settler expansion.”
Along with its statement, the IDF released a grainy, night-vision video of what it said was the incident that showed three people, one of whom appeared to throw an object.
Both Amer’s father and brothers said they couldn’t identify him from the video, but that the shooting occurred at a well-known teenage hangout spot amid green almond trees that had just begun fruiting.
One of the other boys, Palestinian American Ayub Ijbara, remains in the hospital. Abdul Rahman Shhadah has returned home. Both are also 14.
Traipsing through the small town’s hilly outskirts is “something that Palestinian boys do,” Amer’s brother Saad said.
The family all said they thought it was unlikely that Amer and his friends had been throwing rocks at cars. If they were throwing rocks at all, it was more likely they were trying to knock the almonds from the trees.
But even if they had been targeting cars on the nearby road — which wasn’t clearly visible from the scene of the IDF shooting — teenage hijinks shouldn’t have merited a death sentence, they said.
“I want the whole world to hear our story so they can feel the same way if this happened to an American kid or an Israeli kid,” said Amer’s grandfather Amjad. “We want them to be safe in this world, not killed at 14 years old.”
