An Israeli soldier fatally shot an American citizen and peace activist, Aysenur Eygi, in the head on Friday while she was participating in a peaceful protest against an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank. Haaretz reports on what witnesses to the shooting saw:
Three eyewitnesses present at the protest in the West Bank town of Beita, where a 26-year-old American-Turkish human rights activist was shot dead on Friday, told Haaretz that Israeli troops shot her for no reason and there had been no clashes at the time.
Like the murder of American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by an Israeli sniper in May 2022, this is a clear case of a member of the Israeli military gunning down an unarmed American citizen. The IDF’s account of this killing – that their soldiers were responding to a rock-throwing “instigator” – is no more credible than the story that they spun two years ago when one of their men shot a journalist in the head. There must be a credible independent investigation into Aysenur Eygi’s murder, and the shooter must be made to answer for the crime.
Multiple witnesses all testify to the same thing that happened on Friday. According to a statement from the International Solidarity Movement, the organization to which Ms. Eygi belonged, “Aysenur was more than 200 meters away from where the Israeli soldiers were, and there were no confrontations there at all in the minutes before she was shot. Regardless, from such distance, neither she, nor anyone else could have possibly been perceived as posing any threat. She was killed in cold blood.”
The Biden administration’s response has been predictably poor. The White House says that it is “deeply disturbed” by the news, but that’s all. Secretary of State Blinken said, “We deplore this tragic loss,” as if Ms. Eygi had been struck by lightning or killed in a car crash. The official line is that the administration is “seeking more information,” but they should already have more than enough information to know what happened and who was responsible for the killing. The refusal to say that an Israeli soldier killed her is deliberate obfuscation on their part.
The National Security Council spokesman said that the administration has asked the Israeli government to investigate the shooting, so it seems that they are already preparing to let them off the hook. No one believes that an Israeli investigation will hold anyone accountable or lead to any real punishment. If there is even an admission of error at some point in the future, it will be treated as an unfortunate accident that will have no consequences for the perpetrator.
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Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.