The United Nations and White House have called for a thorough investigation after a US-Turkish woman was fatally shot during a protest in the occupied West Bank.
Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was shot in the head by Israeli forces during a weekly protest against West Bank settlements on Friday in the town of Beita, near the city of Nablus, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa.
The 26-year-old had only arrived on Tuesday as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement, Al Jazeera reported.
The Israeli military said on Friday that it was “looking into reports that a foreign national was killed”.
“Today, during Israeli security forces activity adjacent to the area of Beita, the 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 on social media platform X.
“The IDF is looking into reports that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area. The details of the incident and the circumstances in which she was hit are under review,” it added.
White House national security council spokesperson Sean Savett said Washington was “deeply disturbed by the tragic death of an American citizen”, adding: “We have reached out to the government of Israel to ask for more information and request an investigation into the incident.”
Stephane Dujarric, who is spokesperson for the UN’s secretary general Antonio Guterres, said: “We would want to see a full investigation of the circumstances and that people should be held accountable.”
Civilians “must be protected at all times”, Mr Dujarric added.
Eygi, from Seattle, was a recent psychology graduate of the University of Washington, according to her Linkedin profile.
In a statement, Eygi’s family urged Joe Biden to pursue an independent Washington probe into her killing, and described her as a “fiercely passionate human rights activist” who had recently participated in college campus protests against US support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
Her death comes weeks after the village of Jit was attacked by around 100 masked settlers, who fired guns, burned homes and threw Molotov cocktails at vehicles, killing one Palestinian – a 23-year-old named as Mahmoud Abdel Qader Sadda – and badly injuring others, health officials said.
In July, the US imposed new sanctions on an Israeli settler group and four unauthorised outposts in the occupied West Bank, two months after the UK also announced further sanctions on extremist Israeli groups inciting and perpetrating settler violence against Palestinian communities.
More than 600 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by Israeli fire since Hamas’s attack on October 7 triggered the war in Gaza, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Most have died during near-daily raids by the Israeli military.
Over the past 10 days, dozens of Palestinians have reportedly been killed in the deadliest Israeli operation since the war with Hamas began 11 months ago, as its forces targeted the Jenin refugee camp, employing what the United Nations called “lethal war-like tactics.”
Water and electric services were cut, families confined to their homes and ambulances evacuating the wounded were slowed on their way to nearby hospitals, as Israeli soldiers searched for militants.
And in a separate incident on Friday near Beita, in the village of Qaryut, a 13-year-old girl was killed by Israeli gunfire, Palestinian health officials said, after settlers attacked the village.
The girl’s father was quoted by Wafa as saying she was in their home when it was hit by gunfire. The Israeli military said it was investigating after its troops had fired in the air to disperse what it described as violent confrontations between dozens of settlers and Palestinians in the area.
Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem in the 1967 war, having since built scores of settlements in the West Bank occupied by hundreds of thousands of settlers with Israeli citizenship, while the three million Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli military rule.
According to the UN, the population of Israeli settlers living in some 279 settlements grew from 520,000 to more than 700,000 in the decade to 2022, many of which are illegal even under Israeli law as well as international law.
The UN’s human rights council was told in May that, in line with the expansion of such settlements, attacks against Palestinians last year reached the highest levels ever recorded, with Israel failing to investigate and prosecute such crimes against Palestinians committed by settlers and Israeli forces.
Additional reporting by agencies