Israeli soldiers shoot and kill American woman during West Bank protest
Nablus, Sep 6: Israeli soldiers killed an American woman participating in an anti-settlement protest in the West Bank on Friday, another protester who witnessed the shooting told The Associated Press. Two doctors said she was shot in the head.
US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller confirmed the death of the 26-year-old woman born in Turkey as Aysenur Ezgi Eygi. He did not say whether she had been shot by Israeli troops. The White House said in a statement it was “deeply disturbed” by the killing of a US citizen.
Eygi was also a Turkish citizen, Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Oncu Keceli said, adding that the country would exert “all effort to ensure that those who killed our citizen is brought to justice.”
The Israeli military said it was looking into reports that troops had killed a foreign national while firing at an “instigator of violent activity” in the area of the protest.
The woman who was fatally shot was attending a weekly demonstration against settlement expansion, protests that have grown violent in the past: A month ago, American citizen Amado Sison was shot in the leg by Israeli forces, he said, as he tried to flee tear gas and live fire.
Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli who was also participating in the protest, said the shooting occurred shortly after dozens of Palestinians and international activists held a communal prayer on a hillside outside the northern West Bank town of Beita overlooking the Israeli settlement of Evyatar.
Soldiers surrounded the prayer, and clashes soon broke out, with Palestinians throwing stones and troops firing tear gas and live ammunition, Pollak said.
The protesters and activists, including Pollak and the woman, retreated from the hill and the clashes subdued, he said. He then watched as two soldiers standing on the roof of a nearby home trained a gun in the group's direction and shot at them. He saw the flares leave the nozzle of the gun when the shots rang out. He said the woman was about 10 or 15 metres behind him when the shots were fired.
He then saw her “lying on the ground, next to an olive tree, bleeding to death,” he said.
Two doctors said she had been shot in the head — Dr. Ward Basalat, who administered first aid at the scene and Dr. Fouad Naffa, director of Rafidia Hospital in the nearby city of Nablus where she was taken.
“We tried to save the American citizen, we tried to revive the heart for several stages, but unfortunately, we did not succeed in restoring the heart to function,” Naffa told The AP, adding that she had severe bone fragmentation and damage to brain tissue.
Eygi is the third activist from the International Solidarity Movementto have been killed since 2000. ISM activists often place themselves between Israeli forces and Palestinians to try to stop the Israeli military from carrying out operations. Two ISM activists — American Rachel Corrie and British photography student Tom Hurndall — were killed in Gaza in 2003.
Corrie was crushed to death in March 2003 as she tried to block an Israeli military bulldozer from demolishing a Palestinian home in the southern Gaza town of Rafah near the Egyptian border. Hurndall was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier in April.
It's also one of a handful of cases in which apparent Israeli fire killed Americans inside the West Bank since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. Neither American nor Israeli authorities have released findings into investigations into the twin killings of two Palestinian-American teens, Mohammad Khdour and Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, shot in the span of a month while driving down dirt roads close to their villages in the northern West Bank.
In a written statement shared on X, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said it condemned “this murder carried out by the Netanyahu government.”
Palestinian officials said the killing reflected how Israel has intensified its repression of Palestinian protests in the territory since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. Israeli forces rarely use live ammunition to put down protests inside Israel. But in the West Bank, Palestinian demonstrations are frequently met with live fire.
Hussein Al-Sheikh, the secretary general of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, wrote on X that the killing marked “another crime added to the series of crimes committed daily by the occupation forces."
Settlements are overwhelmingly viewed by the international community as illegal under international law.
The settlement of Evyatar was initially an outpost unrecognized under Israeli law but was legalized by the Israeli cabinet last month, in a move the far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said was in response to recognition of Palestinian statehood by a number of countries.
Israeli fire has killed over 690 Palestinians in the West Bank since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7, Palestinian health officials say. In that time, attacks by Hamas on Israelis in the territory have also increased.
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Pakistan reports two more polio cases; Total tally now 52
ISLAMABAD: At least two more cases of poliovirus were reported in Pakistan, taking the number of infections to 52 so far this year, a report said on Friday.
“The Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication at the National Institute of Health has confirmed the detection of two more wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) cases in Pakistan," an official statement said.
The fresh infections — a boy and a girl — were reported from the Dera Ismail Khan district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.
“Genetic sequencing of the samples collected from the children is underway," the statement read. Dera Ismail Khan, one of the seven polio-endemic districts of southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, has reported five polio cases so far this year.
Of the 52 cases in the country this year, 24 are from Balochistan, 13 from Sindh, 13 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and one each from Punjab and Islamabad.
There is no cure for polio. Only multiple doses of the oral polio vaccine and completion of the routine vaccination schedule for all children under the age of five can keep them protected.
