Seattle woman shot and killed at West Bank protest

JERUSALEM — A Turkish American woman was fatally shot Friday during a protest against an Israeli settler outpost near the town of Beita, in the occupied West Bank, witnesses and Palestinian officials said.

Three witnesses who had attended the protest said Israeli forces had killed her. The Israeli military said it was looking into the “details of the incident and the circumstances in which she was hit.”

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller confirmed the woman’s death and identified her as Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, while offering condolences to her family.

“We are urgently gathering more information about the circumstances of her death,” he said. “We have no higher priority than the safety and security of American citizens.”

Turkey’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that Eygi, 26, was also a Turkish citizen and blamed Israel’s government for her killing.

Eygi, who lived in Seattle, had recently arrived in Israel as part of a group of international activists who demonstrate in solidarity with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

On Friday, she joined the rally in Beita, where residents have been protesting for years — sometimes violently — against a settler outpost on lands claimed by the village. The Israeli government had recently said it would retroactively approve the outpost.

By 2:35 p.m., she was dead, her head split by a bullet, in Rafidia Hospital in Nablus, said Fouad Nafia, the hospital’s director.

According to the United Nations, Israeli forces and civilians have killed more than 600 Palestinians in the West Bank — the largest toll in years — since the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7 prompted the war in the Gaza Strip. Many of those killed were claimed as members by militant groups, but others appeared to have been civilians.

The demonstrations around Beita began before the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Israeli settlers took over a nearby hilltop in 2021, erecting an outpost known as Evyatar on land claimed by the village. That prompted months of deadly protests in which several residents of Beita were killed and scores wounded.

The outpost was illegal under Israeli law when it was established, lacking Israeli government authorization. But in June, Israel’s Cabinet agreed to retroactively legalize five such outposts, including Evyatar, following a demand by Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister and a settler leader.

Most of the world considers all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this. Roughly 500,000 Israeli settlers live in the territory alongside nearly 3 million Palestinians who live under Israeli military occupation.

On Friday, the Israeli military said soldiers had “responded with fire toward a main instigator of violent activity” who threw stones at Israeli forces, endangering them. Witnesses on the scene did not deny that some had hurled rocks at Israeli troops but said the clashes were long over when Eygi was shot.

The protest began around noon, with dozens of residents and a smattering of international activists, including Eygi, rallying near Jabal Sbeih, the hilltop upon which Evyatar sits, witnesses said.

Some demonstrators hurled stones at Israeli soldiers some distance away, to which the soldiers responded by firing tear gas and some bullets, said Hisham al-Dweikat, a Beita resident who attended the demonstration. They then headed back roughly 200 meters into the built-up outskirts of the town, away from the troops, he added.

Israeli troops remained in roughly the same position, also taking over the rooftop of a nearby building, said Jonathan Pollak, a hard-left Israeli activist who was at the demonstration. By then, people had mostly scattered and there were no clashes in the area, he said.

About a half an hour after the demonstrators had retreated, Pollak said he saw one of the soldiers on the roof fire a single gunshot. He immediately took cover as he heard a second gunshot, he added.

One wounded a Palestinian, he said. No information about that person’s condition was immediately available.

The other hit Eygi — who was standing about 50 feet away from Pollak — in the head, he said.

“I put my hand on the back of her head to try and stop the bleeding,” Pollak said. “She had a very weak pulse.”

Eygi was rushed to a local clinic in Beita before being taken by ambulance to the largest nearby city, Nablus. By the time she arrived, she was no longer breathing, Nafia said.

Cemal Birden, Eygi’s uncle, said he was still in a state of shock. Her family had moved from Antalya, on Turkey’s southern Mediterranean coast, to the United States when she was less than a year old, he said.

He said he had tried to warn Eygi — who had studied psychology — that going to Jerusalem was too dangerous.

“My niece was such a pure, such a good kid,” Birden said in a phone interview.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.