Israeli soldiers fatally shot American woman at West Bank protest

Palestinians walk on a damaged road following an Israeli military operation in the West Bank city of Jenin on Friday, Sept. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed)

NABLUS, West Bank — Israeli soldiers killed an American woman demonstrating against settlements in the West Bank on Friday, two protesters who witnessed the shooting told The Associated Press. Two doctors said she was shot in the head.

The U.S. government confirmed the death of 26-year-old Aysenur Ezgi Eygi but did not say whether she had been shot by Israeli troops. The White House said in a statement that it was “deeply disturbed” by the killing of a U.S. citizen and called on Israel to investigate what happened.

Eygi was also a Turkish citizen, Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Oncu Keceli said, adding that the country would exert “all effort to ensure that those who killed our citizen is brought to justice.”

The Israeli military said it was looking into reports that troops had killed a foreign national while firing at an “instigator of violent activity” in the area of the protest.

The woman who was fatally shot was attending a weekly demonstration against settlement expansion, protests that have grown violent in the past: A month ago, American citizen Amado Sison was shot in the leg by Israeli forces, he said, as he tried to flee tear gas and live fire.

Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli who was 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 the northern West Bank town of 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, including Pollak and the Eygi, retreated from the hill and the clashes subdued, he said. He then watched as two soldiers standing on the roof of a nearby home trained a gun in the group’s direction and shot at them. He saw the flares leave the nozzle of the gun when the shots rang out. He said Eygi was about 10 or 15 meters (yards) behind him when the shots were fired.

He then saw her “lying on the ground, next to an olive tree, bleeding to death,” he said.

Mariam Dag, another ISM activist at the protest, also said she saw an Israeli soldier on a rooftop. Dag said she then heard the firing of two live bullets. One ricocheted off something metal and hit a Palestinian protester in the leg; the other hit Eygi, who had moved back into an olive grove, she said. Dag said she ran toward the fallen woman and saw blood coming from her head.

“The shots were coming from the direction of the army. They were not coming from anywhere else,” she said.

Eygi had just arrived in the West Bank on Tuesday, Dag said. “This was our first day on the ground together. She was very happy and very excited this morning to start. She was really keen on coming to the demonstration.”

“This has been happening to Palestinians for decades. This happened because of the impunity which the Israelis act with,” including help from Western governments, she said. Before Friday’s shooting, ISM said 17 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces at the weekly Beita protests since March 2020.

Two doctors confirmed Eygi was shot in the head — Dr. Ward Basalat, who administered first aid at the scene, and Dr. Fouad Naffa, director of Rafidia Hospital in the nearby city of Nablus where she was taken.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. was “intensely focused” on determining what happened and that “we will draw the necessary conclusions and consequences from that.”

In a written statement shared on X, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said it condemned “this murder carried out by” the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

At least three activists from the International Solidarity Movement have been killed since 2000. ISM activists often place themselves between Israeli forces and Palestinians to try to stop the Israeli military from carrying out operations. Two ISM activists — American Rachel Corrie and British photography student Tom Hurndall — were killed in Gaza in 2003.

Corrie was crushed to death in March 2003 as she tried to block an Israeli military bulldozer from demolishing a Palestinian home in the southern Gaza town of Rafah near the Egyptian border. Hurndall was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier about a month later.

It’s also one of a handful of cases in which apparent Israeli fire killed Americans inside the West Bank since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. Neither American nor Israeli authorities have released findings into investigations into the twin killings of two Palestinian-American teens, Mohammad Khdour and Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, shot in the span of a month while driving down dirt roads close to their villages in the northern West Bank.

Palestinian officials said the killing reflected Israel’s intensified repression of Palestinian protests in the West Bank since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. Israeli forces rarely use live ammunition to put down protests inside Israel. But in the West Bank, Palestinian demonstrations are frequently met with live fire.

Hussein Al-Sheikh, the secretary general of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, wrote on X that the killing marked “another crime added to the series of crimes committed daily by the occupation forces.”

Settlements are overwhelmingly viewed by the international community as illegal under international law.

The settlement of Evyatar was initially an outpost unrecognized under Israeli law but was legalized by the Israeli cabinet in July, in a move the far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said was in response to recognition of Palestinian statehood by a number of countries.

Israeli fire has killed over 690 Palestinians in the West Bank since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7, Palestinian health officials say. In that time, attacks by Palestinian militants on Israelis in the territory have also increased.