Activists Mourn Palestinian Man Killed in West Bank After Being Denied Entry at SFO

Bay Area friends and allies are mourning the killing of a Palestinian human rights activist who the United States denied entry at San Francisco International Airport last month.

Awdah Al-Hathaleen was shot and killed Monday by an Israeli settler, according to Phil Weintraub, an organizer with the Palestinian Solidarity Committee at the Kehilla Community Synagogue in Piedmont, which sponsored Al-Hathaleen’s aborted visit.

“It’s unfathomable to process,” Weintraub told KQED. “Friend, father, brother, parent of three sons, teacher. He didn’t want to be an activist. It was thrust upon him in order to protect his community.”

Weintraub said witnesses identified Yinon Levi, a “well-known” Israeli settler, as the shooter. Footage posted on social media website  X shows a man identified as Levi firing his handgun in different directions in front of a bulldozer, a tool and symbol of illegal settlement.

Levi was previously under sanctions from the European Union, the United Kingdom and the U.S. for his involvement in illegal and violent expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. The Biden-era U.S. sanctions were lifted by President Donald Trump earlier this year.

Haaretz reported that Israeli courts released Levi while police continue to investigate him for a potential manslaughter case.

Al-Hathaleen, a teacher from the southern West Bank village of Umm Al-Khair, captured footage used in No Other Land, the 2025 Oscar winner for best documentary, which depicted clashes between residents and Israeli settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories. Al-Hathaleen and his cousin were invited to the U.S. by a coalition of groups in the Bay Area — who have supported the men’s work in their village — as part of an interfaith humanitarian mission.

Kehilla members had been meeting with Al-Hathaleen over Zoom for three years, Weintraub said, as part of the Face-to-Face Jewish-Palestinian Reparations Alliance, a group that sought to build connections between Israelis, Jews and Palestinians who oppose Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

The trip was intended to “build bridges between cultures,” and “to raise summer camp funds to help give Palestinian children experiencing the unthinkable a semblance of a childhood back home,” according to a statement on Tuesday from San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who went to SFO with activists last month to oppose the men’s detainment.

When the two men landed at SFO, they were detained for hours and then sent back home by immigration authorities, supporters said.

“Awdah Hathaleen came to the U.S. to warn us about settler violence and land theft in the West Bank and the genocide unfolding in Gaza. … Instead of listening, our government silenced him,” Robert McCaw, government affairs director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations and its Bay Area office, said in a statement on Monday.

“Now he’s been killed by an Israeli settler,” McCaw continued. “We didn’t just turn him away. We sent him back to die.”

In a statement emailed to KQED on June 16, Customs and Border Patrol said the men “failed to establish they were admissible to the U.S.,” and then “withdrew their applications for admission and departed.”

A broad swath of Bay Area leaders, including Reps. John Garamendi, Jared Huffman, Ro Khanna, Sam Liccardo, Zoe Lofgren, Kevin Mullin, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, Lateefah Simon, Eric Swalwell, and Mike Thompson, issued a joint statement condemning the cousins’ denial of entry to the U.S. Protesters who gathered at the airport’s international arrivals hall were joined by Mahmood and fellow Supervisor Jackie Fielder.

Mahmood spoke out against Al-Hathaleen’s killing on Tuesday, condemning the murder and “the Israeli government’s occupation of Palestine.”

“We must call it what it is: a genocide of an entire population,” the supervisor said in a statement. “For Awdah and many like him, I am calling for this killing of innocent civilians to come to an end, and for peace to be promoted once more.”

Al-Hathaleen’s family was refugees forced out of their homes as part of the creation of Israel in the late 1940s, Weintraub said. In the years that followed, they purchased their home in Umm Al-Khair, a shepherding community with goats and olive trees.

In 1980, Israel set up a settlement, Carmel, right next to the village. These settlements are considered illegal under international law, which Israel has disputed. Carmel has also drawn international criticism for the stark disparities in living conditions between the village and the settlement.

“The situation was already bad before October 2023, but it escalated dramatically after,” Weintraub said. “We’re most fearful for the survival of the village — that was most important to Awdeh — the protection and safety of the residents of Umm Al-Khair.”

Weintraub fears that unconditional financial support from the U.S. to Israel — which continues its devastating war with Hamas in Gaza, despite widespread reports of starvation — allows settlers like Levi to continue the illegal settlement of Palestinian lands.

“The fear is that the situation is just going to get worse and worse in the West Bank — these folks can do what they want with impunity,” he said.

KQED’s Carly Severn contributed to this report.