A postmortem has confirmed that an elderly Palestinian-American man who died after being detained in an Israeli raid had a “stress-induced sudden cardiac arrest stemming from external violence”, after witnesses challenged soldiers’ accounts of events in the high-profile incident.
Omar Abdalmajeed As’ad, 78, was detained in his village of Jiljilya in the occupied West Bank at an impromptu road checkpoint on 12 January and “apprehended after resisting a check”, according to an Israel Defence Forces (IDF) statement. He was handcuffed, gagged and blindfolded for between 20 minutes and an hour, and his body was discovered by local residents and others detained in the raid after the soldiers left.
