Police said a suspect was in custody after the shooting near the Capital Jewish Museum

Police said a suspect was in custody after the shooting near the Capital Jewish Museum

A suspect is in custody after shooting dead two Israeli embassy staff outside a Jewish museum in Washington on Wednesday night.

The gunman, named by police as Elias Rodriguez, 30, of Chicago, approached a group of four people leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum and opened fire, killing Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim.

Metropolitan police chief Pamela Smith said the shooter had been pacing outside the museum, which is steps away from the FBI’s field office, before the shooting.

After killing the pair, who officials said were a couple, he walked inside, where event security detained him. The suspect yelled: “Free, free Palestine,” after he was arrested, police said.

  • Milk_Sheikh@lemm.ee
    7810·
    14 days ago

    Genuinely awful for these two and their families, but the same can be said for ~53,000 dead Palestinians and the rest who are actively starving to death in a Israeli-made famine while aid rots onboard trucks across the border. Both acts are deliberate, and both were avoidable.

    And while they were both working for the current extremists in power atm via the diplomatic service, they were a lot more moderate too:

    Lischinsky “I’m an ardent believer in the vision that was outlined in the Abraham Accords and believe that expanding the circle of peace with our Arab neighbours and pursuing regional cooperation is in the best interest of the state of Israel and the Middle East as a whole. To this end, I advocate for interfaith dialogue and intercultural understanding.”

    Milgrim organised visits and missions to Israel. She was also a volunteer at Tech2Peace, an advocacy group training young Palestinians and Israelis and promoting dialogue between them.

    Tech2Peace said Milgrim was an active volunteer who “brought people together with empathy and purpose”.

    • TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
      683·
      14 days ago

      I mean also…

      “In his final post on social media hours before the attack, Lischinsky had shared a post from the Israeli ambassador, Amir Weissbrod, accusing UN officials of engaging in “blood libel” over claims that 14,000 children faced starvation in Gaza.”

      Not saying they deserved any violence, but even once moderate Israelis have been driven pretty far right in the last couple years. Accusations of blood libel while the state is actively starving children doesn’t exactly seem to be promoting any positive dialogue.

      • Milk_Sheikh@lemm.ee
        362·
        14 days ago

        Yeeeesh, hadn’t seen that reporting…

        It’s unbelievably disappointing to see over and over again that Israelis are broadly okay with the death and destruction in Gaza, when a little over a generation ago they were on the cusp of a genuine two-state solution. And now it’s an ethnostate that practices apartheid, and it’s okay because “Bibi keeps us safe”. Almost as if nothing else matters.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          11·
          14 days ago

          It was always an Apartheid state - their own laws from the very start separate Israeli Citizenship from Israeli Nationality, with only Jews being allowed to have the last (in addition to the former) which has additional rights over mere Citizenship - and it had a Genocide already pretty near the time of its formation called the Nakba, only that was “just” displacement and a few murders rather than mass murdering hundreds of thousands of people.

          It’s just that for a while their Propaganda was very successful and they might have even be genuinelly considering merelly not taking over the rest of Palestine as giving back that which they had already stolen was never on the table, nor was the return of the Palestinians or a genuinelly equal society for both Jews and Non-Jews.

          Israel was always shit since it’s formation (which by the way involved them commiting terrorist attacks), it’s just that now they’ve gone extreme Genocidal on their way to commiting a XXI Century version of the Holocaust.

      • bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works
        711·
        14 days ago

        The context is important. A UN official said 14,000 children would die in 48 hours. As it turns out that was a grossly exaggerated claim.

        a report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) which stated 14,100 severe cases of acute malnutrition are expected to occur among children aged six to 59 months between April 2025 and March 2026.

        The IPC report says this could take place over the course of about a year - not 48 hours

        Weissbrod called that out.

        • TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
          8·
          14 days ago

          I don’t think I would really consider it a grossly exaggerated claim, more of just a misinterpretation of a report.

          “For now let me just say that we know for a fact that there are babies who are in urgent life-saving need of these supplements that need to come in because their mothers are unable to feed themselves.”

          “And if they do not get those, they will be in mortal danger,” he said.

          I definitely wouldn’t claim that it was a claim based on antisemitism as Weissbrod is accusing. It’s a fact that the Israeli state is starving tens of thousands of people for no justifiable reason. I don’t think a misinterpretation of the timeline is really enough to claim someone is participating in blood libel.