It's not very often that an event in the West Bank village of Jililya garners the attention of members of the U.S. Congress from Wisconsin. But the killing of a 78-year-old Palestinian American from Milwaukee by soldiers of Israel's ultra-Orthodox battalion has embarrassed Jerusalem, infuriated the U.S. State Department and placed a new stumbling block on the already rocky road of Israeli-Palestinian conciliation. More than a month later, the country is still coming to terms with what happened.
On the night of Jan. 12, one of the coldest of the year, Omar Abdel Majeed Asad was detained by Israeli troops near the West Bank town of Jililya as he was driving home from a social event.
The soldiers stopped his car and took him to an empty lot, where he was handcuffed, gagged, blindfolded and laid on the ground. The time was 3:20 a.m. Forty minutes later, one of the soldiers noticed that the captive had turned blue in the face and he wasn’t moving. He was taken to a nearby clinic and pronounced dead. An autopsy conducted by Palestinian doctors found that he died of heart failure.
