CNN
—
A 26-year-old American activist, Aysenur Eygi, has been shot and killed during an anti-settlement protest near Nablus, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, according to US and Palestinian officials.
The Israeli military has admitted to firing at the demonstrators and has not said if any other gunmen were present.
US Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew confirmed that Eygi, who was born in Turkey, was the victim and said the embassy was “urgently gathering more information about the circumstances of her death.”
She was shot during a weekly demonstration against an Israeli settlement near the Palestinian village of Beita, according to a fellow demonstrator and a resident.
Eyewitnesses and Palestinian officials said the Israeli military was responsible.
The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that its forces “responded with fire toward a main instigator of violent activity who hurled rocks at the forces and posed a threat to them.” It said that it was “looking into reports that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area.”
Protests at Beita are common. The Palestinian town is next to a ramshackle Israeli settler outpost known as Evyatar. The settlement was unauthorized by the Israeli state until it was legalized earlier this year. All Israeli settlements are considered illegal under international law.
Dr. Hisham Dweikat, a resident of Beita who took part in the demonstration, told CNN that as the protest was wrapping up, the Israeli military started firing tear gas towards the crowd.
“As people were running away, live fire was shot and a soldier fired directly at the protesters, hitting the American activist in the head from behind and falling to the ground,” he said.
Eygi was crouched behind a dumpster at the bottom of a hill when gunfire began, Vivi Chen, an American activist who volunteers for the same organization as Eygi, Faza’a, and was at the demonstration, told CNN.
“We were all at the bottom of the hill and the Israeli army was at the top,” Chen said. “There were two volunteers sitting behind a dumpster and they fired one shot at the dumpster. It hit a metal plane. And then there was another shot and they shot – they shot her in the head.”
Video shared with CNN by Chen shows paramedics wrestling her body onto a stretcher. Blood pours from a hole in her forehead.
Eygi was brought to Rafidia hospital in Nablus, where she was pronounced dead.
“They are one of the most advanced armies in the world,” Chen said. “They have weapons from America. It is not an accident that they hit her in the head. That was on purpose. It’s not that they shot a hundred shots at the same time, and she was hit with one. We were all standing still, not moving. Just standing there, and they shot her through the head.”
The governor of Nablus, Ghassan Daghlas, decried Eygi’s death during a visit to Rafidia hospital.
“We say to the international community, this woman held American citizenship,” he told journalists. “But the bullets did not differentiate between a Palestinian, a child, an old man, or a woman, and between one nationality and another.”
National Security Council spokesperson Sean Savett said the US was “deeply disturbed” by Eygi’s death. “We have reached out to the Government of Israel to ask for more information and request an investigation into the incident,” he added.
The activist’s death comes nine days after Israel’s military launched one of its most expansive operations in the West Bank in years, carrying out raids and airstrikes in multiple parts of the occupied territory.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said the operation aimed to “thwart Islamic-Iranian terrorist infrastructure,” claiming that Iran was working to establish an “eastern front” against Israel to work alongside Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
Clashes in the West Bank have become more frequent since Israel began its war in Gaza in response to Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on October 7.
Nearly 700 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah and the UN, whose figures do not distinguish between militants and civilians.
This is a developing story and will be updated.