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Witness: Israeli troops intentionally killed US activist

Maureen Clare Murphy, The Electronic Intifada, 7 September 2024

Ayşenur Eygi, the American activist killed by an Israeli sniper in the West Bank village of Beita, during graduation from the University of Washington in spring 2024. (Image courtesty of the family, via ISM)

Israeli occupation forces killed both an American woman during a protest in Beita, a village near Nablus in the northern occupied West Bank, and a 13-year-old Palestinian girl in a separate but nearby incident on Friday.

In the latter incident, Bana Amjad Baker (some outlets gave her family name as Laboom) was struck by a bullet in her chest while in her home during confrontations that erupted in Qaryut village, also near Nablus, after settlers raided and attacked the community.

The girl’s father said that she was shot by Israeli occupation forces while in her room with her sisters, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.

Also on Friday, Israeli troops withdrew from Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank after a 10-day raid in which essential infrastructure was destroyed and at least 21 Palestinians were killed and more than 130 injured.

Israeli forces have laid siege to several other refugee camps in the northern West Bank since 28 August. At least 39 Palestinians were killed in the territory during that time, including in Jenin.

Israeli troops desecrate boy’s body

On Friday, Defense for Children International-Palestine stated that on the previous day, “Israeli forces shot and killed a 16-year-old Palestinian boy in the northern occupied West Bank then desecrated his body.”

The teen, Majed Abu Zeina, “was shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier from a distance of 30 meters” in al-Faraa refugee camp south of Tubas.

“Israeli soldiers approached Majed as he lay injured on the ground and prevented a Palestinian ambulance from reaching him,” according to Defense for Children International-Palestine.

Majed pleaded with Israeli soldiers to let the ambulance help him, but they ignored him” and one of them ordered him to lift up his shirt, “which revealed a homemade explosive device that Majed was allegedly carrying.”

The soldier “then shot Majed at point-blank range in the neck, killing him,” according to the children’s rights group.

Video shows an Israeli military bulldozer moving the boy’s body with the front blade. The soldiers operating the bulldozer drove around al-Faraa with the teen’s body in the blade for an hour before dumping him in another area of the camp.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights said that the boy’s abdomen was torn open while being carried by the bulldozer and his internal organs were exposed. His body was “disfigured and unrecognizable” when it was finally retrieved following the withdrawal of Israeli troops hours later.

Defense for Children International-Palestine said that 76 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank so far this year, including two US citizens.

At least 157 children are among the nearly 700 Palestinians killed in the West Bank since October.

“Intentional killing” of American woman

The US citizen killed in Beita on Friday was identified as 26-year-old Ayşenur Eygi, a resident of Seattle, Washington, who was born in Turkey.

“It was an intentional killing that cannot be justified,” according to Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli anti-occupation activist who was present when Eygi was shot in the head:

Pollak said that he and others had joined Beita’s weekly demonstration against the colonization of village land.

Israeli troops fired tear gas and live ammunition during confrontations that ensued following afternoon prayers held during the protest, forcing demonstrators to retreat towards the village.

Demonstrators were congregated on the outskirts of the village some 150-200 meters away from Israeli troops, according to Pollak. The situation was quiet when a sniper positioned on a rooftop fired two live bullets, he said.

The first bullet hit a metal object and shrapnel hit a village resident in his thigh. The second one was the bullet that hit Eygi.

“I found her lying on the ground … bleeding from her head,” Pollak said, adding that she “had a very weak pulse.” Eygi was evacuated to a hospital but efforts to save her life failed.

Saad Dhiab, a resident of Beita, told WAFA that after the shots rang out, “I saw the soldiers dancing happily at what they had done.”

The International Solidarity Movement stated that Eygi was an activist with the group and is the 18th person to be killed in the context of Beita’s protests since 2020, following the establishment of Evyatar, a settlement outpost, on village land.

Evyatar, which was most recently evacuated by the Israeli government in 2021, has become a symbolic site for the settlement movement emboldened by top political figures in Benjamin Netanyahu’s extreme-right coalition.

In June last year, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, urged settlers to “run for the hilltops” during a visit to Evyatar. He called for killing “thousands” of terrorists to “fulfill our great purpose: the land of Israel for the people of Israel” and assured settlers that “we’ve got your back.”

The weekly protests in Beita were revived and therefore the repression increased after the Israeli cabinet approved the retroactive “legalization” of Evyatar in June this year, according to the International Solidarity Movement.

Last month, Amado Sison, another American volunteer, was shot in the back of his leg during a demonstration in Beita.

All Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory.

Following the killing of Eygi, the Israeli military claimed 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.”

Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, said the government “deplored” the death of Eygi. He added that the facts still needed to be established and declined to say whether her killing would lead to any change in policy on allocation of American weapons to Israel:

US citizens killed by Israel with impunity

Several international activists with the International Solidarity Movement have been severely injured or killed by Israeli forces since the group’s founding in 2001, including American college student Rachel Corrie and British photography student Thomas Hurndall, who were both fatally injured by soldiers in Gaza in 2003.

Two other US citizens were killed by Israeli forces during humanitarian missions to Gaza.

Jacob Flickenger, a dual US-Canadian citizen, was killed by the Israeli military while working for the Washington-based charity World Central Kitchen in Gaza earlier this year.

In 2010, Furkan Doğan, an 18-year-old US citizen and Turkish legal permanent resident, was shot five times, including once in the head at point-blank-range, and killed alongside eight others in international waters when Israeli commandos stormed the flagship Mavi Marmara that was part of a humanitarian flotilla attempting to break the siege on Gaza.*

A tenth passenger died of his injuries four years later. All of those killed during the raid, except for Doğan, were Turkish citizens.

Instead of seeking accountability for the American teen’s death, the Obama administration in Washington worked behind the scenes to “turn off” a UN fact-finding mission into the Mavi Marmara massacre, as documents from the US mission in Geneva showed.

The International Criminal Court probed the incident but ultimately declined to open a formal investigation. Fatou Bensouda, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor at the time, stated in 2020 that war crimes may have been committed but the Israeli attack on the flotilla was not “sufficiently grave” to warrant prosecution.

That court has been petitioned to investigate the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, the iconic Al Jazeera reporter and US citizen who was shot in the head by an Israeli army sniper while covering a military raid in Jenin in 2022.

Later that year, Al Jazeera released a documentary laying out the complicity of the Biden administration in Israel’s cover-up of Abu Akleh’s death.

Palestinians with US citizenship may be among the nearly 40,900 killed in Gaza since 7 October. Thousands more Palestinians not reflected in the official fatality count are missing under the rubble of destroyed buildings or their unidentified bodies haven’t been recovered from the streets.

On Friday, Abed Ayoub, the executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, stated that “for decades, Israel has been killing Palestinians and US citizens without consequence, exposing the hypocrisy and double standards of US rule of law, our politicians and the media.”

“The same voices that outcried the death of an Israeli soldier with US citizenship held captive in Gaza remain silent when other US citizens, all civilians, are executed by Israeli forces,” Ayoub added, referring to Hersh Goldberg-Polin.

Goldberg-Polin, who was captured at a music festival during the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023, was found dead alongside five other captives in southern Gaza last Saturday.

Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic senator from Maryland, said on Friday that he had “repeatedly” raised concerns over the lack of accountability for the killing of US citizens by Israeli forces.

“The Biden administration has not been doing enough,” he said.

“If the Netanyahu government will not pursue justice for Americans, the US Department of Justice must,” he added.

MAUREEN CLARE MURPHY

Maureen Clare Murphy's picture

Maureen Clare Murphy is senior editor of The Electronic Intifada.

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