TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A radical Israeli settler accused of shooting and killing a Palestinian activist during a confrontation with unarmed Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, and who was filmed firing a pistol during the incident, was released under house arrest on Tuesday.
Witnesses say Yinon Levi, who was previously under U.S. sanctions that were lifted by the Trump administration, killed Awdah Hathaleen, an activist, English teacher and father of three. The shooting occurred Monday night in Umm al-Khair, a village that has long weathered settler violence in an area profiled in an Oscar-winning film.
The Israeli military said an Israeli civilian had opened fire toward “terrorists” who hurled rocks at Israelis. Israeli police said they detained an Israeli for questioning “on suspicion of reckless conduct resulting in death and unlawful use of a firearm,” as well as five Palestinians and two foreigners.
Police said Tuesday that a court denied their request to extend the detention of the Israeli and ordered the suspect's release to house arrest. The police did not identify the suspect, but Israeli media ran photos of a smiling Levi inside a courthouse on Tuesday.
Multiple calls placed to Levi’s phone were not answered, and it was not known if he had hired an attorney.
Meanwhile, residents said four of the five arrested Palestinians remained in Israeli custody.
Umm al-Khair is in Masafer Yatta, the focal point of the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land,” which chronicles the Palestinians’ effort to remain on their land in the face of violence and the expansion of Jewish settlements considered illegal by most of the international community.
Hathaleen, whose footage appears in the documentary, was outspoken about life under Israeli occupation. His death sparked an outpouring of grief from family, international activists and rights groups.
“They took the other half of my heart,” his brother-in-law, Tariq Hathaleen, wrote on Instagram. “You were always telling the story, and now you’ve become the story.”
The encounter in which witnesses said Hathaleen was shot was caught on video in footage obtained by The Associated Press.
The video shows Levi waving a pistol during a standoff with a group of Palestinians on a dusty road, a yellow excavator visible in the background. Witnesses said Levi was there to protect the excavator, which had rolled down from a nearby settlement and damaged Palestinian property earlier in the day.
Alaa Hathaleen, a cousin who filmed the encounter, said he approached Levi “face to face, filming him with my phone, telling him that we don’t have weapons and we were trying to stop him.”
In the video, a Palestinian shouts that Levi is a “bastard and a thief.” Levi shoves someone just out of the frame and shouts: “Who threw stones?”
Another Palestinian shouts “Shoot me! Shoot!” and Levi fires a shot, seemingly away from the crowd. He then glances back at the excavator and fires again. “Get away from here, go away!” Levi shouts.
The video does not show where the bullets struck.
Motasim Hathaleen, 38, another cousin who was standing a few dozen meters (yards) away, said he saw Levi fire twice and then saw Awdah fall to the ground. Local activists said they attempted CPR.
Rights groups say Israeli security forces frequently ignore settler violence or intervene on the settlers’ side during confrontations with Palestinians. Israel says its forces try to maintain order.
The over 500,000 settlers in the West Bank have Israeli citizenship, while the territory’s 3 million Palestinians live under military rule, with the Palestinian Authority exercising limited autonomy in towns and cities.
Settler attacks on Palestinians have spiked since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, as have attacks by Palestinian militants. The military has carried out several major military operations in the West Bank that have killed hundreds of Palestinians and forced tens of thousands from their homes.
Last year, the Biden administration imposed U.S. sanctions like travel bans and asset freezes on radical settlers accused of violence, including Levi. The State Department at the time accused Levi of leading settlers in attacks on Palestinians, threatening them, burning fields and destroying property. He is still sanctioned by the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada.
Anti-settlement activists say Levi has led attacks that displaced more than 300 Palestinians from four nearby hamlets since establishing a settlement outpost known as Meitarim Farm in 2021.
In an interview last year, after the sanctions were imposed, Levi said the land was his and that he was protecting it from encroachment by Palestinians. He denied using violence to displace people.
“Little by little, you feel when you drive on the roads that everyone is closing in on you,” he said at the time. “They’re building everywhere, wherever they want. So you want to do something about it.”
U.S. President Donald Trump, who lent unprecedented support to Israel’s settlement movement during his first term, lifted the sanctions after returning to the White House.
The extended Hathaleen family and activists gathered at a mourning tent on Tuesday. Israeli troops arrived later, ordering all foreign passport holders and media to leave, saying the area was a closed military zone.
“He left behind three children,” Alaa, who filmed the video of Levi shooting, said. “The oldest is only five years old. What am I supposed to tell his kids?”
Basel Adra, the Palestinian co-director of “No Other Land” who lives in a nearby village, said Awdah was a “father, was a teacher, was an amazing activist and a close friend to us.”
Umm Al-Khair was founded in the 1950s by traditionally nomadic Bedouin, who settled there after being uprooted from the Negev desert during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation. Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war.
Last year, Israel’s military tore down a quarter of the homes in Umm Al-Khair, saying they had been built without Israeli authorization.
The settlement of Carmel, just a few miles away, was built in the 1980s. Large homes and lush gardens sit across a barbed-wire fence from the village, whose homes of corrugated tin bake in the summer sun.
On the day he died, Awdah sent an urgent call to his network of activists and reporters.
“The settlers are working behind our houses and the worst (is) that they tried to cut the main water pipe for the community," he wrote. “If you can reach people like the Congress, courts, whatever, please do everything. If they cut the pipe the community here will literally be without any drop of water.”
AP Senior Producer Jalal Bwaitel contributed to this report from Ramallah, West Bank.
FILE - Caravans and simple structures for residents of the West Bank Bedouin village of Umm al-Khair, are seen at the entrance on July 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo, File)
Federal immigration agents deployed to Minneapolis have used aggressive crowd-control tactics that have become a dominant concern in the aftermath of the deadly shooting of a woman in her car last week.
They have pointed rifles at demonstrators and deployed chemical irritants early in confrontations. They have broken vehicle windows and pulled occupants from cars. They have scuffled with protesters and shoved them to the ground.
The government says the actions are necessary to protect officers from violent attacks. The encounters in turn have riled up protesters even more, especially as videos of the incidents are shared widely on social media.
What is unfolding in Minneapolis reflects a broader shift in how the federal government is asserting its authority during protests, relying on immigration agents and investigators to perform crowd-management roles traditionally handled by local police who often have more training in public order tactics and de-escalating large crowds.
Experts warn the approach runs counter to de-escalation standards and risks turning volatile demonstrations into deadly encounters.
The confrontations come amid a major immigration enforcement surge ordered by the Trump administration in early December, which sent more than 2,000 officers from across the Department of Homeland Security into the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Many of the officers involved are typically tasked with arrests, deportations and criminal investigations, not managing volatile public demonstrations.
Tensions escalated after the fatal shooting of Renee Good, a 37-year-old woman killed by an immigration agent last week, an incident federal officials have defended as self-defense after they say Good weaponized her vehicle.
The killing has intensified protests and scrutiny of the federal response.
On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota asked a federal judge to intervene, filing a lawsuit on behalf of six residents seeking an emergency injunction to limit how federal agents operate during protests, including restrictions on the use of chemical agents, the pointing of firearms at non-threatening individuals and interference with lawful video recording.
“There’s so much about what’s happening now that is not a traditional approach to immigration apprehensions,” said former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Sarah Saldaña.
Saldaña, who left the post at the beginning of 2017 as President Donald Trump's first term began, said she can't speak to how the agency currently trains its officers. When she was director, she said officers received training on how to interact with people who might be observing an apprehension or filming officers, but agents rarely had to deal with crowds or protests.
“This is different. You would hope that the agency would be responsive given the evolution of what’s happening — brought on, mind you, by the aggressive approach that has been taken coming from the top,” she said.
Ian Adams, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, said the majority of crowd-management or protest training in policing happens at the local level — usually at larger police departments that have public order units.
“It’s highly unlikely that your typical ICE agent has a great deal of experience with public order tactics or control,” Adams said.
DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a written statement that ICE officer candidates receive extensive training over eight weeks in courses that include conflict management and de-escalation. She said many of the candidates are military veterans and about 85% have previous law enforcement experience.
“All ICE candidates are subject to months of rigorous training and selection at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, where they are trained in everything from de-escalation tactics to firearms to driving training. Homeland Security Investigations candidates receive more than 100 days of specialized training," she said.
Ed Maguire, a criminology professor at Arizona State University, has written extensively about crowd-management and protest- related law enforcement training. He said while he hasn't seen the current training curriculum for ICE officers, he has reviewed recent training materials for federal officers and called it “horrifying.”
Maguire said what he's seeing in Minneapolis feels like a perfect storm for bad consequences.
“You can't even say this doesn't meet best practices. That's too high a bar. These don't seem to meet generally accepted practices,” he said.
“We’re seeing routinely substandard law enforcement practices that would just never be accepted at the local level,” he added. “Then there seems to be just an absence of standard accountability practices.”
Adams noted that police department practices have "evolved to understand that the sort of 1950s and 1960s instinct to meet every protest with force, has blowback effects that actually make the disorder worse.”
He said police departments now try to open communication with organizers, set boundaries and sometimes even show deference within reason. There's an understanding that inside of a crowd, using unnecessary force can have a domino effect that might cause escalation from protesters and from officers.
Despite training for officers responding to civil unrest dramatically shifting over the last four decades, there is no nationwide standard of best practices. For example, some departments bar officers from spraying pepper spray directly into the face of people exercising Constitutional speech. Others bar the use of tear gas or other chemical agents in residential neighborhoods.
Regardless of the specifics, experts recommend that departments have written policies they review regularly.
“Organizations and agencies aren’t always familiar with what their own policies are,” said Humberto Cardounel, senior director of training and technical assistance at the National Policing Institute.
“They go through it once in basic training then expect (officers) to know how to comport themselves two years later, five years later," he said. "We encourage them to understand and know their training, but also to simulate their training.”
Adams said part of the reason local officers are the best option for performing public order tasks is they have a compact with the community.
“I think at the heart of this is the challenge of calling what ICE is doing even policing,” he said.
"Police agencies have a relationship with their community that extends before and after any incidents. Officers know we will be here no matter what happens, and the community knows regardless of what happens today, these officers will be here tomorrow.”
Saldaña noted that both sides have increased their aggression.
“You cannot put yourself in front of an armed officer, you cannot put your hands on them certainly. That is impeding law enforcement actions,” she said.
“At this point, I’m getting concerned on both sides — the aggression from law enforcement and the increasingly aggressive behavior from protesters.”
Law enforcement officers at the scene of a reported shooting Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Adam Gray)
Federal immigration officers confront protesters outside Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Adam Gray)
People cover tear gas deployed by federal immigration officers outside Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Adam Gray)
A man is pushed to the ground as federal immigration officers confront protesters outside Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/John Locher)
A woman covers her face from tear gas as federal immigration officers confront protesters outside Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Adam Gray)
