American killed at protest was shot by Israeli soldiers, witnesses say

A woman wearing a graduation cap and kaffiyeh smiles.

By Julia Frankel and Aref Tufana

Sept. 6, 2024 Updated 2:26 PM PT

NABLUS, West Bank — Israeli soldiers killed an American woman demonstrating against settlements in the West Bank on Friday, two protesters who witnessed the shooting said. 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, a volunteer with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement, was also a citizen of Turkey, Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Oncu Keceli said. He added that the country would exert “all effort to ensure that those who killed our citizen [are] 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.

A covered body is transported on a gurney inside a hospital.

Eygi was shot during a weekly demonstration against settlement expansion. A month ago, American citizen Amado Sison said he was shot in the leg by Israeli forces as he tried to flee tear gas and live fire.

Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli who took part 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 praying group, 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 Eygi, retreated from the hill, 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 said. He saw the flares leave the muzzle of the gun when the shots were heard. He said Eygi was about 10 or 15 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.

Another International Solidarity Movement activist at the protest, who did not want her name used, also said she saw an Israeli soldier on a rooftop. The activist said she then heard two gunshots. 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. “The shots were coming from the direction of the army. They were not coming from anywhere else,” she said.

Before Friday’s shooting, ISM said, 17 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces at the weekly Beita protests since March 2020.

At the University of Washington, where Eygi recently graduated with a degree in psychology, President Ana Mari Cauce released a statement in which she recalled Eygi as a mentor to her peers who “helped welcome new students to the department and provided a positive influence in their lives.” Eygi took courses on the languages and cultures of the Middle East.

Two doctors said Eygi had been 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 J. 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 Israeli 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 the few cases in which apparent Israeli fire has killed Americans in the West Bank since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. Neither American nor Israeli authorities have released findings from investigations into the 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 how Israel has intensified its repression of Palestinian protests in the territory 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, secretary general of the Palestine 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 last month, in a move the far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said was in response to recognition of Palestinian statehood by several countries.

Israeli fire has killed more than 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.

Frankel and Tufana write for the Associated Press. AP writer Jack Jeffery in Ramallah, West Bank, contributed to this report.