White House calls on Israel to investigate after American activist shot dead during West Bank protest
Colleagues of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, an American Turkish activist who died after reportedly being shot in the West Bank town of Beita, react on news of her death in a hospital in Nablus in the West Bank on Sept. 6, 2024. (AFP via Getty Images).
(JTA) — The White House is calling on Israel to investigate after a Turkish-American woman was fatally shot Friday during a protest against an Israeli settler outpost in the West Bank.
Palestinian and Turkish officials accused Israeli troops of fatally shooting the woman, identified by the State Department as 26-year-old Aysenur Ezgi Eygi.
A resident of Seattle, Eygi was in the West Bank with the International Solidarity Movement, a group of activists that has for many years turned out to support Palestinian demonstrations against Israeli settlement expansion. The American activist Rachel Corrie who was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer during a protest in Gaza in 2003 was also part the group.
“We are urgently gathering more information about the circumstances of her death,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said about Eygi. “We have no higher priority than the safety and security of American citizens.”
The Israeli military said its soldiers had fired toward a male “main instigator” who was throwing stones at the troops, and that it was looking into what had happened to Eygi.
“The details of the incident and the circumstances in which she was hit are under review,” the military said.
The rally Friday took place in the village of Beita targeting the Israeli presence on lands claimed by Palestinian residents. Israeli settlers took over a nearby hilltop in 2021 and established the outpost of Evyatar without permission from the Israeli government. The Israeli cabinet legalized the outpost last month, turning it into a recognized settlement.
Doctors at the Rafidia Hospital in Nablus where Eygi died said her head was split by a bullet, according to local media reports.
The governor of Nablus, Ghassan Daghlas, called on the United States to intervene and cast the death Eygi as an example of Israeli crimes.
“We appeal to President Biden to stop all support to the occupying state because the occupying state is working hard to bomb hospitals and kill children and kill foreigners, including American nationals,” he told reporters.
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, took to X to attack Israel after Eygi’s death. “I condemn Israel’s barbaric intervention against a civilian protest against the occupation in the West Bank, and I pray for God’s mercy on our citizen Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, who lost her life in the attack,” he wrote.
In a separate incident on Friday, a 13-year-old Palestinian girl was shot to death in her home in the village of Qaryut, also near Nablus. The human rights group Yesh Atid said the shooting took place after extremist Jewish settlers attacked the village; Palestinian officials said the Israeli army had fired the fatal shot.
More than 600 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank since Oct. 7, some belonging to militant groups and others civilians, according to the United Nations. That’s a sharp rise from what was already the bloodiest year on record before Oct. 7.
Israel says it has arrested more than 5,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since Oct. 7, including more than 2,000 that it says are affiliated with Hamas there.
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