Palestinians and international activists inside the morgue Sunday where the body of slain Turkish American activist Aysenur Eygi is being kept, in Nablus in the occupied West Bank. (Heidi Levine/The Washington Post)
Aysenur Eygi had come to Israel on an impassioned mission. The 26-year-old American activist and recent University of Washington graduate volunteered for the International Solidarity Movement, a pro-Palestinian activist group, and went to the occupied West Bank to participate in the organization’s routine attendance and monitoring of Palestinian protests against illegal Israeli settlements.
Eygi was shot and killed Friday on the sidelines of a Palestinian protest of Israeli settlement expansion near the town of Beita. Witnesses said she was slain by Israeli soldiers. Nablus Gov. Ghassan Daghlas later told reporters that an autopsy “confirmed that Eygi was killed by an Israeli occupation sniper’s bullet to her head.”
Jonathan Pollak, a volunteer with the ISM, told The Washington Post that the shooting took place about half an hour after protesters had dispersed, when there were no active clashes or incidents of stone throwing, and as foreign volunteers, including Eygi, stood observing about 200 yards from the Israeli military. “There was no justification for taking that shot,” he said.
The Israel Defense Forces in a statement said it was “looking into reports that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area” and that “details of the incident and the circumstances in which she was hit are under review.” The statement said Israeli forces in the area of Beita had “responded with fire toward a main instigator of violent activity who hurled rocks at the forces and posed a threat to them.”
If the IDF’s response sounds familiar, it should. It put out a similar statement last week when Israeli snipers allegedly killed 16-year-old teenage girl Loujain Musleh in a West Bank town in the environs of Jenin — site of months of violence — as Israeli troops raided a nearby house. “Snipers were everywhere,” Osama Musleh, Loujain’s father, told The Post of the morning she was killed. She “went to have a look from the window,” he said, and moved the curtain to see what was happening. “Then she was shot. The army shot six bullets,” including two that hit Loujain, he said.
The IDF obfuscated in 2022 following the killing of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was reporting on clashes in restive Jenin when she was shot in the head. It initially blamed her death on Palestinian militants, even when witnesses, including Abu Akleh’s Al Jazeera colleagues, said it was clear she had been shot by Israeli troops. Subsequent investigations by a host of organizations, including forensic open-source analysis by The Washington Post and a ballistics examination carried out by the U.S. government, concluded that she was killed by Israeli gunfire.
Israeli authorities later conceded that Abu Akleh may have been killed by one of their troops, but asserted that no Israeli soldier “deliberately fired” at a journalist, offering no evidence to substantiate that claim. No soldier was punished for her death, while the Biden administration’s promises to deliver accountability for the killing of an American journalist abroad proved hollow and halfhearted.
That story could repeat itself in the case of Eygi, whose family has called on U.S. officials to push for an independent investigation. The White House has thus far called on Israel to investigate the incident. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday that the U.S. government is “intensely focused on getting those facts.” He added, “When we have more info. … We’ll make it available. And, as necessary, we’ll act on it.”
Eygi had dual U.S.-Turkish citizenship and her killing elicited a far sterner response from Ankara. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said over the weekend that Israel had “heinously murdered our young child.”
At least 40,972 people have been killed in Gaza since the war started, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children. Israeli officials repeatedly stress the care they take to avoid civilian casualties and frequently pin the loss of Palestinian civilian lives on Hamas, the militant group that launches its strikes on Israel from densely populated Gaza.
But the staggering destruction of the territory, the appalling humanitarian crises afflicting Gazans and the numerous mass casualty events that have punctuated the brutal war have heightened scrutiny on Israel. Parallel cases on genocide and war crimes are working their way through the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, respectively. A number of Western governments closely allied to Israel have partially suspended arms exports to the Jewish state, out of concern that these armaments are invariably involved in the slaying of civilians.
Witnesses in Gaza have throughout the past 11 months pointed to incidents where they say they were targeted by Israeli snipers or saw innocent bystanders and civilians gunned down by them. Doctors, including some dispatched by international aid organizations, working in Gazan hospitals describe the majority of casualties they encounter as the result of airstrikes and bombardments — treating burns, shrapnel wounds and injuries sustained amid falling debris and rubble — but called out numerous cases of people, including little children, killed by single shots to the head.
“We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die,” wrote visiting U.S. doctors Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa for Politico in July. “Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.”
These reports are difficult to verify in the fog of war. Human rights groups and U.N. experts have in past iterations of conflict in Gaza and the West Bank documented evidence of Israeli snipers killing or injuring civilian protesters. The IDF has rejected suggestions that its personnel would deliberately target civilians.
In the case of Eygi’s killing, precedent suggests there will be little accountability. “Like the olive tree she lay beneath where she took her last breaths, Aysenur was strong, beautiful, and nourishing,” Eygi’s family said in a statement. “Her presence in our lives was taken needlessly, unlawfully, and violently by the Israeli military.”
