You can't exactly expect a plane to keep flying when you've commanded the engines to stop running/taken away their fuel at such a critical time...

There is no procedure that involves cutting off fuel to both engines while in-flight; one at a time, but not both. Then, there is no procedure that ever involves touching those controls during takeoff. Finally; there would be communication between the pilots discussing any such troubleshooting, they wouldn't just take it upon themselves to start flipping switches without at the very least letting the other pilot know what they're doing. Particularly when it comes to troubleshooting; there is a strict set of checklists they go through as a team, with one reading out questions, the other responding with data/answers from the instruments and the first confirming that response.

These were both experienced pilots with ample flight hours; they knew what they were doing at those controls. I'm not going to throw human error out the window entirely, but it's not looking very likely unfortunately.

Either that plane was brought down intentionally, or there was a stunning error in judgment wildly disregarding procedure in that cockpit that was not communicated at all. (note: the mics record to the blackbox continuously, they're not ptt, if one of the pilots had said something, it'd be on the tape.)

There’s no communication between the two pilots before the switches were moved to cutoff to suggest they encountered any problems prior to fuel cutoff.

Breathalysers don't detect tired or suicidal pilots.

The interim report stated copilot was pilot flying meaning they only focus on flying and he had also just flown already today. Captain however was his first flight in his shift and was also pilot monitoring.

Apparently they need to be pulled to change their orientation, I'm wondering if the mechanism simply wore out?

From the article...

The fuel switches were “designed to be intentionally moved,” according to CNN safety analyst David Soucie, who said cases in which all fuel switches were turned off accidentally are “extremely rare.”

“Throughout the years, those switches have been improved to make sure that they cannot be accidentally moved and that they’re not automatic. They don’t move themselves in any manner,” Soucie said on Friday.

And the photo of the throttle (middle) and fuel cutoff switches (bottom):

https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/c-gettyimages-951922648-20250711223914009.jpg?q=w_1160%2Cc_fill%2Ff_webp

There's just one-level-deeper of questions I'd have here. How were the switches designed such that they prevented accidental activation? Because it looks like they just get simply flipped down. Could it be pull-out-and-down? Or maybe there's a lot of resistance during the switch action?

You can also just throttle back, which would have the same effect.

by guards I meant the guard brackets which help prevent accidental movement (source) but I agree I just can't see this being done accidentally. the look and feel of the switches are just so different it'd be almost like mistaking a red light for a green one with normal colour vision or something. it's still early days so i'm sure more will come out about the history of the pilots with time. if this does turn out to be intentional it's pretty scary because it's something that's unrecoverable at that phase of flight if it happens and that needs to not happen again