The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) shooting death of Aysenur Eygi, an American volunteer observer from Seattle, last week is drawing new Western attention to the mounting casualties in Gaza and the West Bank, casualties largely created by merciless military action of the Israeli state and the illegal settlers in the occupied territories supported by that state.
Since the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their ancestral lands that followed the creation of Israel, the Israeli military and the illegal Israeli settler movement have often turned the land of Israel/Palestine into a free fire zone.
This has been true for decades, but the pace of ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence has increased since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, when nearly 1,200 Israelis were killed and over 251 hostages were taken. Human Rights Watch has found that the October events included war crimes and crimes against humanity. However, this is not the only finding from international human rights defenders about crimes in Palestine. In 2021 Human Rights Watch said that Israeli government policy toward Palestinians involved crimes against humanity. In October 2023 Amnesty International noted that the Israeli response to the October 7 attacks had already approached the level of war crimes. In June of this year, a United Nations investigation found that:
“In relation to Israeli military operations and attacks in Gaza, the Commission found that Israeli authorities are responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare, murder or wilful killing, intentionally directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects, forcible transfer, sexual violence, torture and inhuman or cruel treatment, arbitrary detention and outrages upon personal dignity.”
Usually, the dead and wounded are Palestinians, and they are often ignored or minimized by mainstream Western media. The shooting death (at the hands of an IDF sniper, according to witnesses,) of an American International Solidarity Movement volunteer, Aysenur Eygi on Friday, September 6 in the occupied West Bank village of Beita, may draw more Western attention to the ongoing slow-motion genocide being perpetrated against the Palestinian people.
In a press release, the International Solidarity Movement said:
“During the weekly demonstration in Beita, Palestine, on the morning of September 6th, 2024, the Israeli army intentionally shot and killed an International Solidarity Movement (ISM) human rights activist named Ayşenur Eygi. The demonstration, which primarily involved men and children praying, was met with force from the Israeli army stationed on a hill. Initially, the army fired a large amount of tear gas and then began using live ammunition. The human rights activist, who we consider a martyr in the struggle, was the 18th demonstrator to be killed in Beita since 2020. She was an American citizen of Turkish descent.”
David Mivasair, a Canadian rabbi who is active in Palestinian solidarity work (and who was himself arrested by the IDF in 2019 while standing as a volunteer with Palestinians conducting non-violent resistance in the West Bank) told Rabble on September 6:
“This is absolutely horrible. Of course, Israel kills Palestinians literally every day with total impunity. The only difference here is that the woman they murdered was an American.”
Anna Lippmann is a Canadian grad student who has participated in three solidarity trips to support Palestinian human rights in Palestine/Israel since 2023, including time spent in Nablus, very close to where Aysenur Eygi died. She is a member of the Centre for Jewish Nonviolence
and a member of the Canadian board of directors of Independent Jewish Voices.
Lippman told rabble on September 7 that what she saw on her solidarity trips was “…a complete dehumanization of a people who only want to be left in peace.” As a Jew herself, Lippmann says she sees the policies of the Israeli government toward Palestinians as “a bastardization of Judaism.” She said she felt morally impelled to protest “acts of terror in the West Bank in the name of my religion, in the name of my safety.” She called the news of the latest death “heartbreaking.”
Lippmann called on Canadians to pressure our government to stop implicit support for ethnic apartheid in Israel and the Occupied Territories.
The International Solidarity Movement describes itself on its website as committed to non-violence.
“The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a Palestinian-led movement committed to resisting the long-entrenched and systematic oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian population, using non-violent, direct-action methods and principles. Founded in August 2001, ISM aims to support and strengthen the Palestinian popular resistance by being immediately alongside Palestinians in olive groves, on school runs, at demonstrations, within villages being attacked, by houses being demolished or where Palestinians are subject to consistent harassment or attacks from soldiers and settlers as well as numerous other situations.”
According to the British paper The Independent, the IDF suggested the non-violent protester was to blame for her own death, saying on social media:
“Today, during Israeli security forces activity adjacent to the area of Beita, the forces responded with fire toward a main instigator of violent activity who hurled rocks at the forces and posed a threat to them,” the IDF statement said on social media platform X.
Witnesses to the shooting denied that Eygi was an “instigator of violent activity.” According to The Washington Post witnesses said the Seattle based volunteer was simply observing and supporting a peaceful prayer session held near land that has recently been taken from Palestinians to make room for an illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank.
They went on to say that they had observed IDF snipers on rooftops nearby and saw them aiming at the international observers.
But as Eygi would have been the first to say, the main victims of IDF and settler
violence have been Palestinians. As the United Nations reported earlier this month: “… since 7 October 2023, 652 Palestinians have been killed outside of Gaza, including 151children, thousands injured, over 3,300 have been displaced and over 12,000 arbitrarily detained, de facto hostages of the unlawful occupying Power.”
Meanwhile, within Gaza, the IDF’s campaign of revenge and war crimes continues, with over 40,000 deaths reported, most of them civilians, women, and children.
In Eygi’s hometown of Seattle, her friends and family mourn her death. They reject a US call for an investigation by the Israeli government, and call for an independent US investigation of her death. They also note that this is the second time a volunteer from Washington state has died in Israel while supporting Palestinian rights, citing the death 21 years ago of Olympia resident Rachel Corrie. It is nearly a year now since the latest Israeli attacks on Palestinians began after October 7, and the scale of the human consequences continues to grow.
More innocent civilian deaths, more slaughtered children every day. I urge all my readers to contact the Prime Minister ([email protected] , and [email protected] ) and tell him we demand that all Canadian complicity with the Palestinian genocide be ended and that Canada join with the parents of Aysenur Eygi in calling for an independent investigation into her death.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
