Murder in Beita: the IDF’s Killing of Ayşenur Eygi

Beita is a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank a few miles from Nablus. Beita is an ancient town with houses dating back to the Roman occupation of Palestine. For the past few years, the residents of Beita, many of them farmers, have been under siege from militant Israeli settlers, who have seized their land, diverted their water and torched their fields and olive groves.

In 2013, a caravan of militant Israeli settlers who were part of the Nachala Movement, whose explicit goal is the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, seized a swath of Palestinian land on Mount Sabih that had been a communal olive grove for the Palestinian villagers in Beita for decades.

Without any authorization from the Israeli government, the settlers built an “outpost” on Mount Sabah with the aid of Israeli soldiers. The settlers proclaimed that one of the goals of the outpost was to “disrupt the contiguity” between Palestinian lands in the northern West Bank. The outpost was demolished several times by the Israeli government and quickly rebuilt after the bulldozers left, again with the assistance of IDF forces in the area.

In 2023, thousands of Israeli militants marched on Beita, demanding that the Evyatar Outpost be “legalized” by the Netanyahu government. The march was led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Belazel Smotrich, with security provided by Israeli police and the IDF. On June 27, the Netanyahu regime officially declared the land beneath Evyatar as state property land authorized the outpost as a settlement, along with four other outposts. Smotrich smugly said the decision to “legalize” the five outpost was in retaliation for the five nations that had recognized Palestinian as a state a few weeks before.

Since 2021, the villagers of Beita have conducted weekly protests against the illegal outpost, protests which have routinely been violently suppressed by the IDF and the settlers. On July 9, 2021, the IDF fired on hundreds of Palestinian, Israeli and international peace activists, wounding at least 379 people. Since 1967, at least 77 Beita villagers have been killed by Israeli forces, most of them during protests. In the summer of 2021 alone, seven Palestinians were shot and killed during the weekly protest, and nearly 1000 were injured.

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It was into this fraught and dangerous situation that a young American peace activist named Ayşenur Aygi came to lend her support for the Palestinian farmers of Beita. On the morning of September 6, Ayşenur and other activists took a taxi from Ramallah 30 miles north to Beita, where she told friends she wanted to “bear witness” to the relentless theft of Palestinian land and the violent repression of Palestinian farmers who were trying to protect their farms, animals, water supply and orchards.

Ayşenur Eygi was not naive. She knew the score. The 26-year-old recent graduate of the University of Washington was a veteran campaigner who helped lead the Palestinian solidarity movement on campus and had gone to Standing Rock to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, where the demonstrators encountered brutal crackdowns by local cops and private security forces.

Referred to in most of the media as a “Turkish-American,” as if to diminish the meaning of her death, Ayşenur was born in Turkey, but moved with her parents to Washington state when she was a young child. She was raised here, went to school here, and grew up as an environmental and human rights activist here. She had a model for her activism in another young Washingtonian, the Evergreen College student Rachel Corrie, who’d also been an environmental organizer and pro-Palestinian activist. Like Rachel, Ayşenur went to the Occupied Territories as a peace activist with the International Solidarity Movement. Like Rachel, Ayşenur would be killed by the IDF. Like Rachel, Ayşenur’s death would be met with callous indifference by her own government.

Ayşenur went to Seattle Central College and the University of Washington, where she graduated this May, majoring in psychology with a minor in Middle East Languages and Culture. She mentored younger students and helped set up the anti-genocide camp on campus last fall, where she served as a media liaison, a mentor to younger student protesters and an organizer of teach-ins. Her friend Julia Majid described Ayşenur as an “amazing organizer” who was “energetic and passionate about justice…She was the heart of so much of what we did.”

Ayşenur was nervous. Who wouldn’t be?  This was her first demonstration under Israeli occupation. She’d arrived in the West Bank on September 3 and had already experienced the petty cruelties of daily life there. She told friends back in Seattle that she’d been refused permission by Ben Gvir’s police to visit the Al Aqsa Mosque. She described the indignities of Israeli checkpoints and the ominous, looming presence of the Apartheid Wall. And she was well aware of the fact that two weeks before she arrived in Beita, Daniel Santiago, a 32-year-old teacher from New Jersey, also volunteering with the ISM, had been shot in the thigh by an Israeli sniper at a Friday protest. (Young Palestinian men are routinely shot in the leg by the IDF at protests, often with the intent of disabling them from joining future demonstrations.)

So Ayşenur hung back with a couple of other ISM demonstrators as the local Palestinians began their weekly prayer vigil in a children’s park, directly across from a contingent of IDF soldiers. She told a friend: “I’m nervous because the Army is right there.” She was right to be worried.

As the prayer session ended, the IDF forces, which had by then encircled the group, closed in, forcing young Palestinian men and children back down the road toward the village, first by dousing them with tear gas, then almost immediately with live fire. As the Palestinian demonstrators retreated, the Israelis claimed some threw rocks at the heavily armed IDF soldiers, always a pretext for an even more violent response. The ISM later said none of its member had thrown stones and at no point were any of the Israeli soldiers threatened.

But Ayşenur wasn’t with this group anyway, she’d already retreated down the road toward the olive grove some 200 yards in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, several Israeli soldiers took up positions on the top of a hill and four or five others climbed on to the roof of Ali Maali’s house, parking their armored vehicle nearby. Maali told the Washington Post that the IDF frequently usurps his roof during the Friday prayers, because it gives them unobstructed views of the park, the road and the olive grove. On this day, Maali and his family huddled on the veranda of his house, trying to stay out of the view of the Israeli snipers.

As Ayşenur and her friend Helen scrambled down the road to the olive grove, Helen tripped on a rock, spraining her ankle. Ayşenur helped her up and Helen leaned on the young American activist the rest of the way to the shelter of the grove, where they sat down behind a tree until the shooting stopped around 1:30 in the afternoon.

The confrontation had died down. For about twenty minutes, Ayşenur stayed in the olive grove, talking about what she’d just witnessed when an Israeli sniper on the roof of a building fired a shot, striking a Palestinian youth who was standing about 20 yards from Ayşenur in the leg. Israeli snipers in the West Bank often shoot Palestinian protesters, especially young men, in the leg, often to cripple them and keep them from leading future protests.

Then a sniper fired again. Ali Maali heard the shots fired from his roof, telling the Washington Post, the sound “shook the house.” This time it was a kill shot, hitting Ayşenur in the head. She collapsed immediately. Her friend Helen yelled frantically for help, as she bled out from a head wound.

“We were standing in the street, and it was calm; nothing was happening. Soldiers climbed onto the roof of a house, and I saw a soldier aiming, and then I heard gunfire,” said Jonathan Pollack, a veteran Israeli peace campaigner and correspondent for Haaretz, who witnessed the demonstration and the Israeli response. “The first shot hit something metallic and then the thigh of a young man from the village, and then there was another shot. Then someone called my name in English and said they needed help. I ran about 15 meters and saw her [Eygi] lying on the ground under olive trees, bleeding to death. She had a gunshot wound to the head. I looked up and saw there was a direct line of sight between us and the soldiers…It was quiet. There was nothing to justify the shot. The shot was taken to kill.”

Ayşenur was lifted into a stretcher by paramedics and taken to Rafidia Hospital in Nablus, where after attempts to resuscitate her failed, she was pronounced dead at around 2:35 p.m.–the third American citizen to be shot and killed by the IDF in the occupied West Bank this year.

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Ayşenur Eygi died in the same olive grove where Daniel Santiago had been shot, also by accident, according to Israel’s account, when IDF forces “fired live rounds into the air” aimed at driving off non-violent protesters.

“If Israeli soldiers are willing to shoot a non-violent unarmed American citizen from behind, imagine the level of violence they direct at Palestinians when no one is there to document the settler and IDF’s violence,” Santiago said. “The money I pay in my taxes as a teacher probably funded the bullet they have run through me.”

Earlier this year, Biden warned that “If you harm an American, we will respond.” But five days would pass before Biden said anything about the latest killing of an American citizen by the IDF and then his response was tepid, devoid of any trace of empathy for Ayşenur or her family. He merely regurgitated the absurd line coming out of Tel Aviv: “Apparently it was an accident, ricocheted off the ground and just got hit by accident. I’m working that out now.”

In a series of statements on her death, Ayşenur’s family condemned the Biden administration for accepting the Israeli and demanded an independent investigation.

In the midst of this terrible tragedy, our family has been crossing continents to gather and put our beloved Ayşenur to rest. We will always remember Ayşenur as a kindhearted, silly, and passionate soul whose face expressed all those qualities. We cannot speak of what happened to those expressions when her temple met a bullet fired by a trained Israeli soldier.

Ayşenur was an international observer who stood in witness of “violent extremist Israeli settlers [who] are uprooting Palestinians from their homes”–words President Biden himself used today. Despite this, President Biden is still calling her killing an accident based only on the Israeli military’s story. This is not only insensitive and false; it is complicity in the Israeli military’s agenda to take Palestinian land and whitewash the killing of an American.

Let us be clear, an American citizen was killed by a foreign military in a targeted attack. The appropriate action is for President Biden and Vice President Harris to speak with the family directly, and order an independent, transparent investigation into the killing of Ayşenur, a volunteer for peace.

The Israeli version of the shooting, which the Biden administration swiftly adopted, was quickly shown by witnesses, cellphone videos and a detailed investigation by the Washington Post to be not only implausible but absolute bunk. The murder of Ayşenur Eygi took place at least 20 minutes after the last confrontation between Palestinian villagers and IDF troops. Ayşenur never threw any stones and was never within 200 yards of anyone who did. The rooftop sniper had a clear view of where Ayşenur was standing, talking to her friend Helen, and she couldn’t be confused for a Palestinian “instigator.” For whatever reason, Ayşenur was targeted; the sights of the rifle focused on her head and shot. The bullet that killed her didn’t ricochet off of a tree or a rock or a dumpster. The sniper had a clear shot and took it. As Rachel Corrie’s father, Craig, said this week: “Israel does not do investigations; they do cover-ups.”

Biden’s desultory reaction to Ayşenur’s murder contrasts vividly with his response earlier that week to the killing of another American, Hersh Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who had been taken hostage by Hamas on October 7 and held captive for nearly 11 months, until he was shot in the head, apparently by his captors, during an armed raid by the IDF on the tunnel where he was being held:

I am devastated and outraged. Hersh was among the innocents brutally attacked while attending a music festival for peace in Israel on October 7. Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes. And we will keep working around the clock for a ceasefire and to secure the release of the remaining hostages.

Biden couldn’t even muster up enough compassion to call Ayşenur’s family, console them for the senseless killing of a bright young American and promise them that his administration would investigate the circumstance of her shooting. His demeanor spoke just as loudly as Melania’s infamous jacket: he just didn’t care. Of course, Biden is hardly alone his indifference to the deaths of American citizens at the hands of Israelis. Since Rachel Corrie’s murder by an IDF bulldozer operator, there have been at least 9 other Americans killed by the IDF. None of their families have received any justice (or even much sympathy) from either Israel or their own government…

Ayşenur Eygi
Jacob Flickinger
Mohammad Khdour
Tawfiq Abdel Jabbar Ajaq
Orwa Hammad
Mahmoud Shaalan
Omar Asaad
Furkan Dogan
Shireen Abu Akleh

The FBI has jurisdiction to investigate the murders of Americans overseas. Why not send them to Beita to enforce the rule of law, instead of Tweeting performative outrage while allowing the murderers to exonerate themselves? The question answers itself. The US/Israeli relationship is forged by bonds of impunity for both the killers and their weapons dealer.

Aria Fani, one of Eygi’s professors at the University of Washington, said Ayşenur went to the West Bank to “protect Palestinian farmers from settler violence. I know exactly what she would say right now if she were alive. She’d say, ‘The only reason I’m in the headlines is because I have American citizenship.’ Which I think is sadly true. We’ve become numb to Palestinian loss.”

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