RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Israeli military said Tuesday that an American activist killed in the West Bank last week was likely shot “indirectly and unintentionally” by soldiers shooting at participants in an anti-settlement protest that turned violent. The acknowledgement drew a sharp rebuke from U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the activist’s family.
Israel expressed its “deepest regret” over the death of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a 26-year-old activist from Seattle who also held Turkish citizenship, and said a criminal investigation had been opened.
Asked about the Israeli investigation at a news conference in London, Blinken condemned the “unprovoked and unjustified” killing. “No one should be shot while participating in a protest,” he said. “Israeli security forces must make fundamental changes to the way they operate in the West Bank.”
Eygi’s family in the United States released a statement saying: “We are deeply offended by the suggestion that his killing by a trained sniper was in any way unintentional. The disregard for human life displayed in the investigation is appalling.”
An Israeli protester who witnessed the shooting, Jonathan Pollak, said Eygi was killed about half an hour after clashes between Palestinians and Israeli forces ended, in an area several hundred meters from the protest site. Pollak said he saw two Israeli soldiers climb onto the roof of a nearby house, point a gun at the group and fire, with one of the bullets hitting Eygi in the head.
Israel said its investigation into Eygi’s killing “has revealed that it is very likely that she was hit indirectly and unintentionally by (Israeli army) gunfire that was not directed at her, but at the main instigator of the riot.”
The killing comes amid rising violence in the West Bank since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in October, with an increase in Israeli raids, attacks by Palestinian militants on Israelis, attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians and a harsher military crackdown on Palestinian protests.
Israel says it thoroughly investigates allegations that its forces have killed civilians and holds them accountable. It says soldiers often have to make split-second decisions when operating in areas where militants hide among civilians. But even in the most shocking cases — and those caught on video — soldiers are often given relatively light sentences.
The Palestinian Authority held a funeral procession for Eygi in the West Bank city of Nablus on Monday. Turkish authorities said they were working to repatriate his body to Turkey for burial in the Aegean coastal city of Didim, in accordance with his family’s wishes.
Eygi was a volunteer with the activist group International Solidarity Movement. But her uncle said in an interview with Turkish television station HaberTurk that she had kept her visit to the West Bank a secret from at least some members of her family. She said she was going to Jordan to help the Palestinians, he said.
“She hid the fact that she was going to Palestine. She blocked us from accessing her social media posts so that we wouldn’t see them,” Yilmaz Eygi said.
The deaths of U.S. citizens in the West Bank have drawn international attention, such as the fatal shooting of a prominent Palestinian-American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, in 2022 in the Jenin refugee camp.
Several independent investigations and Associated Press reporting shortly after the killing determined that Abu Akleh was likely killed by Israeli gunfire. Months later, the military said there was a “high probability” that one of its soldiers had killed her by mistake, but that no one would be punished.
Earlier in 2022, the Israeli military said it would punish a senior officer and remove two others from their posts over the death of Omar Assad, 78, a Palestinian-American who was dragged from a car by Israeli troops, bound and blindfolded after being stopped at a checkpoint.
The military later said soldiers believed Assad was asleep when they cut his restraints and left him face down in an abandoned building where he had been held with three other Palestinians.
The deaths of Palestinians who do not have dual nationality rarely receive the same attention.
Human rights groups say Israel rarely holds soldiers accountable for Palestinian killings and that the resulting military investigations often reflect a pattern of impunity. B’Tselem, one of Israel’s leading watchdogs, grew so frustrated with the system that in 2016 it dismissed the investigations as a whitewash and ended its decades-long practice of assisting with probes.
Last year, an Israeli court acquitted a member of the paramilitary Border Police who had been charged with manslaughter in the fatal shooting of Eyad Hallaq, a 32-year-old autistic Palestinian, in Jerusalem’s Old City in 2020. The case had been compared to the police killing of George Floyd in the United States.
In 2017, Israeli soldier Elor Azaria was convicted of manslaughter and served nine months in prison after killing a wounded and incapacitated Palestinian assailant in the West Bank city of Hebron. The military medic was filmed shooting Abdel Fattah al-Sharif dead as he lay motionless on the ground.
The case has deeply divided Israelis, with the military saying Azaria had clearly violated its code of ethics, while many Israelis – particularly on the nationalist right – have defended his actions and accused the army’s top brass of questioning a soldier operating in dangerous conditions.
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