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A gay Palestinian man living under asylum in Israel has been brutally murdered in the West Bank city of Hebron on Wednesday. The man was beheaded, and a video of the act was uploaded to social media. The suspect was arrested near the scene by the Palestinian Authority police.
The victim was 25-year-old Ahmad Abu Murkhiyeh, who according to reports has been living under asylum in Israel for the past two years after Israeli authorities believed his life would be in danger if he returned to Palestinian Authority territory. It remains unclear why the man was in Hebron. His friends believe he was kidnapped, but there has yet to be any evidence which proves this claim.
Rita Petrenko, the founder of the Arab LGBT charity Al-Bayt Al-Mukhtalif had helped the victim arrange his asylum papers, said the victim had planned to resettle in Canada and described him as “hard-working and intelligent”. Approximately 90 Palestinians who identify as part of the LGBT community currently live under asylum in Israel.
An older relative of the victim said in a radio interview that Ahmad often visited Hebron to work and visit his relatives, but Petrenko contradicted this statement saying she does not have any knowledge of Ahmad returning to the West Bank since his asylum and instead the relatives’ comments were possibly motivated by a reluctance to acknowledge the victim’s life in Israel.
A spokesman for the Palestinian Authority Police described the murder as a “new kind of crime in Palestine” and warned social media users to not share the video of the beheading. The spokesman described the crime as one of the most terrible he has ever dealt with. Palestinian media has expressed remorse at the particularly brutal nature of the crime, although Ahmed’s sexual identity and his history of residency in Israel has been excluded from most Palestinian reports.
