A Turkish-American female activist was shot dead Friday during a demonstration against Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank town of Beita, where the army acknowledged opening fire.
Turkey identified the woman as Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, saying she was killed by “Israeli soldiers” and condemning her “murder”. The mayor of Beita and the Palestinian news agency Wafa also reported that she was killed by Israeli soldiers.
Eygi, in her mid-20s, arrived at the Rafidia hospital in Nablus “with a gunshot in the head, and we announced her martyrdom around 14:30 (1130 GMT),” hospital director Fouad Nafaa told AFP.
US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller called Eygi’s death “tragic,” without immediately assigning responsibility.
He said Washington was “urgently gathering more information about the circumstances of her death and will have more to say as we learn more”.
Eygi was a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a pro-Palestinian organisation, and was in Beita to take part in a weekly demonstration against Israeli settlements, said Neta Golan, the group’s co-founder.
Beita mayor Mahmoud Barham told AFP the incident occurred after a weekly Friday prayer performed in protest against an Israeli settlement outpost in the area.
He said he was later told that “a soldier from the (Israeli) army had fired two shots towards those who remained at the (demonstration) site, including the foreign activist, and that one of the bullets hit her in the head”.
Surging violence
The governor of Nablus, Ghassan Daghlas, told reporters that Eygi’s death was an example of “American bullets” killing an American, a reference to Washington’s military support for Israel.
Since Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on southern Israel which triggered the ongoing war in Gaza, Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 661 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
Last month a US citizen told AFP he was shot by Israeli forces and wounded in the leg during a protest against settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, as the Israeli military confirmed it fired live rounds to disperse the gathering.
Palestinian medics said at the time that a foreign activist was shot during the demonstration in the town of Beita, while the Israeli military said he was “accidentally injured”.
Responding to Friday’s incident, Hamas said in a statement it strongly condemned “the crime committed by the Zionist occupation army” resulting in Eygi’s death.
“We consider this heinous crime to be an extension of the deliberate crimes committed by the occupation against foreign activists in solidarity with the Palestinian people, which have claimed the lives of dozens, most notably Rachel Corrie, who was crushed under the tracks of an occupation bulldozer in 2003,” the statement said.
Corrie, 23, was killed in Gaza while she was acting as a human shield with a group of activists from the International Solidarity Movement to prevent troops from demolishing a Palestinian home.
With AFP
