Family of US activist said killed by IDF in West Bank demands independent probe
Israeli activist says he witnessed IDF troops fire on protesters, then saw 26-year-old bleeding to death; US senator says if Israel won’t pursue justice, Washington should
The family of an American woman allegedly shot and killed by IDF troops during a protest near Nablus in the northern West Bank called on Saturday for an independent investigation into her death.
Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, an American originally from Turkey, was an activist with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and was shot dead in the village of Beita on Friday.
“Her presence in our lives was taken needlessly, unlawfully, and violently by the Israeli military,” Eygi’s family said in a statement.
“A US citizen, Aysenur was peacefully standing for justice when she was killed by a bullet that video shows came from an Israeli military shooter.
“We call on President [Joe] Biden, Vice President [Kamala] Harris, and Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken to order an independent investigation into the unlawful killing of a US citizen and to ensure full accountability for the guilty parties,” the family said.
Eygi’s family said she always advocated “an end to the violence against the people of Palestine.”
The military said Friday it was investigating the matter. According to the Israel Defense Forces, during operations near Beita, troops opened fire at a “main instigator” who was hurling stones at the forces and had “posed a threat.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US was “intensely focused” on determining what happened and that “we will draw the necessary conclusions and consequences from that.”
US Senator Chris Van Hollen said Eygi was the third American killed in the West Bank since October 7, when Hamas’s massacre in southern Israel sparked the war in Gaza and a resurgence of West Bank violence.
The “Biden Administration has not been doing enough to pursue justice and accountability on their behalf,” said Van Hollen, a Democrat like Biden and Harris, who sits on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee. “If the Netanyahu Government will not pursue justice for Americans, the US Department of Justice must.”
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned Eygi’s death, saying in a post on social media that Turkey “will continue to work in every platform to halt Israel’s policy of occupation and genocide.”
ISM on Saturday dismissed claims that its activists threw rocks at Israeli forces as “false” and said the demonstration was peaceful.
“Aysenur was more than 200 meters away from where the Israeli soldiers were, and there were no confrontations there at all in the minutes before she was shot,” ISM said in a statement.
Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli participating in Friday’s protest, said the shooting occurred shortly after dozens of Palestinians and international activists held a communal prayer on a hillside outside Beita overlooking the Israeli settlement of Evyatar.
Soldiers surrounded the prayer, and clashes soon broke out, with Palestinians throwing stones and troops firing tear gas and live ammunition, Pollak said.
The protesters and activists retreated and clashes were subdued, he said. He then watched as two soldiers on the roof of a nearby home trained a gun in the group’s direction and fired.
He said he saw Eygi “lying on the ground, next to an olive tree, bleeding to death.”
At the University of Washington, where Eygi recently graduated with a degree in psychology, Aria Fani, a professor of Middle Eastern languages and cultures, recalled Eygi’s activism earlier in the year at a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel encampment and remembered her as someone with a gift for listening to others.
Fani said he had tried to talk Eygi out of going to the West Bank but that she told him “she needed to bear witness for the sake of her own humanity.”
Juliette Majid, a friend of Eygi, told The New York Times the activist was “an amazing organizer” of campus protest activities, including the anti-Israel encampment in spring.
“Her loss is felt profoundly,” Majid said, adding that Eygi “was always reminding us that this was the Palestinian story.”
Saif Sharabati, 20, a Palestinian American born in Seattle and raised in the West Bank, told The Times he held a long phone call with Eygi, who he met at university.
Sharabati said Eygi was disturbed by the obstacles faced by Palestinians in the West Bank, such as checkpoints, and that she was turned away from a visit to the flashpoint Temple Mount site in Jerusalem.
“We talked for two hours about the situation, about what she saw,” he said. “She said all she wanted was to get the message out that this has to stop.”
Ana Mari Cauce, the president of the University of Washington said in a statement that Eygi “helped welcome new students” as a peer mentor, and urged a ceasefire to solve the ongoing war.
On Saturday, AFP footage showed Eygi’s body, wrapped in a blue cloth, kept in a morgue next to the body of Bana Amjad Bakr, a young girl who was killed the previous day in a separate incident in the West Bank.
Fouad Nafaa, head of Rafidia Hospital in Nablus, told Reuters that Eygi had arrived there in critical condition with a serious head injury.
“We tried to perform a resuscitation operation on her, but unfortunately she died,” he said.
The Palestinian health ministry said 13-year-old Bakr was shot and killed by “occupation bullets” in Qaryut, near Beita.
Palestinians said she was shot dead when extremist settlers stormed a village near Nablus and clashed with villagers.
On Saturday, Nablus governor Ghassan Daghlas accused Israeli forces of killing the two.
“Both were killed by the same bullets…. The same bullets,” he said, referring to Israeli forces.
“We call out the international community to stop the insane war on Palestine. Bullets do not differentiate between activists and a Palestinian child,” he said.
Violence in the West Bank has surged in the past year, following the October 7 Hamas terror onslaught in southern Israel, in which some 1,200 people were massacred and 251 were taken hostage.
Since that date, Israeli troops have arrested some 5,000 wanted Palestinians across the West Bank, including more than 2,000 affiliated with Hamas.
According to the Palestinian Authority health ministry, more than 670 West Bank Palestinians have been killed in that time. The IDF says the vast majority of them were gunmen killed in exchanges of fire, rioters who clashed with troops or terrorists carrying out attacks.
During the same period, 29 people, including Israeli security personnel, have been killed in terror attacks in Israel and the West Bank. Another six members of the security forces have been killed in clashes with terror operatives in the West Bank.
