Israel says its forces likely unintentionally shot and killed an American activist in the West Bank

The Israeli military said Tuesday that an American activist who was killed in the West Bank last week was likely shot “indirectly and unintentionally” by Israeli forces who were aiming at someone else.

Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a 26-year-old activist from Seattle who also held Turkish citizenship, was killed Friday following a demonstration against Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, according to Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli protester who witnessed the shooting.

The Israeli military said it “expresses its deepest regret” after its inquiry “found that it is highly likely that she was hit indirectly and unintentionally by (Israeli army) fire which was not aimed at her, but aimed at the key instigator of the riot.”

Pollak said the shooting occurred about half an hour after clashes between Palestinians and Israeli forces had subsided.

Eygi, a volunteer with the activist group International Solidarity Movement, was attending a weekly demonstration against settlement expansion that has been held for years and has often brought Israeli crackdowns and protester stone-throwing.

The killing came amid a surge of violence in the West Bank since the Israel-Hamas war began in October, with increasing Israeli raids, attacks by Palestinian militants on Israelis, attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians and heavier military crackdowns on Palestinian protests. More than 690 Palestinians have been killed, according to Palestinian health officials.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned the killing as “unprovoked and unjustified” while speaking Tuesday at a news conference in London.

“No one should be shot while attending a protest. In our judgement the Israeli Security Forces need to make some fundamental changes in the way they operate in the West Bank,” he said.

The Palestinian Authority held a funeral procession for Eygi in the West Bank city of Nablus on Monday. Turkish authorities said they are working on repatriating her body to Turkiye for burial in the Aegean coastal town of Didim, as per her family’s wishes.

The deaths of American citizens in the West Bank have drawn international attention, such as the fatal shooting of a prominent Palestinian-American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, in 2022 in the Jenin refugee camp.

Several independent investigations and reporting by The Associated Press shortly after the killing determined that Abu Akleh was likely killed by Israeli fire. Months later, the military said there was a “high probablility” one of its soldiers had mistakenly killed her but that no one would be punished.

Earlier in 2022, Israel’s military said it would punish a senior officer and remove two others from their posts over the death of Omar Assad, 78, a Palestinian-American who was dragged from a car by Israeli troops, bound and blindfolded after being stopped at a checkpoint.

The military later said the soldiers believed Assad was asleep when they cut his zip-ties and left him face-down in an abandoned building where he had been detained with three other Palestinians.

The deaths of Palestinians who do not have dual nationality rarely receive the same scrutiny.

Human rights groups say Israel rarely holds soldiers accountable for killing Palestinians and that any resulting military investigations often reflect a pattern of impunity. B’Tselem, a leading Israeli watchdog, became so frustrated with the system that in 2016 it dismissed the probes as a whitewash and halted its decades-long practice of assisting investigations.

The military says it thoroughly investigates allegations of killing civilians and holds its forces accountable. It says soldiers often have to make split-second decisions while operating in areas where militants hide among civilians.

But even in the most shocking cases — and those captured on video — soldiers often get relatively light sentences.

Last year, an Israeli court acquitted a member of the paramilitary Border Police who had been charged with reckless manslaughter in the deadly shooting of 32-year-old Eyad Hallaq, an autistic Palestinian man in Jerusalem’s Old City in 2020. The case had drawn comparisons to the police killing of George Floyd in the United States.

In 2017, Israeli soldier Elor Azaria was convicted for manslaughter and served nine months after he killed a wounded, incapacitated Palestinian attacker in the West Bank city of Hebron. The combat medic was caught on video fatally shooting Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, who was lying motionless on the ground.

That case deeply divided Israelis, with the military saying Azaria had clearly violated its code of ethics, while many Israelis — particularly on the nationalist right — defended his actions and accused military brass of second-guessing a soldier operating in dangerous conditions.