US protester shot dead in West Bank

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A US-Turkish dual citizen was shot dead by Israeli forces while protesting against Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank on Friday, Turkey’s foreign ministry said.

Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, was shot in the head, according to Turkish authorities, and died after being taken to a Palestinian hospital. Eygi was a well-known activist against Israeli settlement expansion in the town of Beita, outside Nablus, where she was killed, Palestinian media reported.

Her death comes at a time of high tensions between Turkey and Israel over the war in Gaza, which has also frayed the key relationship between Israel and the US, its closest ally. It follows an escalation of violence in the West Bank, where Israeli forces over the past two weeks have carried out one of their biggest operations in the territory in years.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters in the Dominican Republic on Friday that “we deplore this tragic loss. When we have more info, we will share it, make it available and, as necessary, we’ll act on it,” he added.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan condemned “Israel’s barbaric intervention against a civilian protest against the occupation in the West Bank” and said his country would “continue to work on every platform to end Israel’s occupation and genocide policy”.

The Israeli military said its forces had fired towards the demonstration after rocks were thrown, but that it was still “looking into” reports Eygi was killed “as a result of shots fired in the area”.

Eygi’s is the third high-profile killing blamed on Israeli forces of a US citizen in the West Bank in recent years. Palestinian-American Shireen Abu Akleh, an Al Jazeera journalist, was shot dead by Israeli forces while covering a gun battle with militants in the Jenin refugee camp in May 2022.

Omar As’ad, 78 and also a Palestinian-American national, died from a heart attack in January 2022 after he was detained by Israeli forces at a checkpoint, gagged and then abandoned.

Hussein al-Sheikh, secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, wrote on social media platform X on Friday: “Another crime added to the series of crimes committed daily by the occupation forces, which require that their perpetrators be held accountable in international courts.”

The Israeli military on Friday said its forces had pulled out of the city of Jenin and an adjacent refugee camp after an operation that it said was also targeting militant hotspots in nearby Tulkarem and the Jordan Valley.

More than 30 Palestinians were killed in the operation, according to the Palestinian health ministry. The Israel military claimed that 14 of them in Jenin alone were armed militants.

Since Hamas’s October 7 attack triggered the war in Gaza, the Israel military has intensified its raids in the West Bank, while Jewish settlers have stepped up their attacks against Palestinians. Israeli forces have killed more than 630 Palestinians in the occupied territory, according to UN figures, and settlers have killed at least 11 in the course of hundreds of attacks.

Over the same period, Palestinians in the West Bank have killed 18 Israelis, including 13 soldiers and five settlers, in the territory and another 10 Israelis in Israel, according to the UN. 

At the same time, settlement construction has soared over the past 18 months under the far-right Israeli government, after Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition entrusted much of the control over civilian affairs in the West Bank to pro-settlement ultranationalists.