It was Friday, September 6, in the town of Beita, and just like on many Fridays in the West Bank, Mariam watched as people gathered to pray and protest the construction of an Israeli settlement.
For Mariam (whose name has been changed to protect against retribution from Israeli settlers and police), the routine was normal. A few dozen people gathered at midday in a garden at the foot of Mount Sabih: old men, young boys, and international “protective presence” activists like her. A new volunteer, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, was with Mariam. A recent graduate from the University of Washington, it was only her third day in the West Bank. It would be, Mariam realized, Eygi’s first demonstration.
For decades, settlers have expanded into the West Bank, taking Palestinian land. Over the past several years, Beita has become a bulwark of Palestinian civil resistance against the Israeli outpost of Evyatar, which was built on a nearby hilltop in 2021. In July, the United Nations’ top court declared that settlements in the West Bank—housing over 500,000 Jewish Israelis, buoyed by religious fervor and generous government tax breaks—are illegal under international law. But that same month, Israel’s government moved to formally authorize Evyatar and four other settlements rather than push settlers to withdraw as the International Court of Justice ordered.
Before the protest began, international activists and Palestinians shared coffee and dates; photos from that morning show Eygi grinning in a bright purple shirt and sunglasses. She was one of many international volunteers who have traveled to the West Bank since the early 2000s to accompany Palestinians—mostly in villages under threat from settlers—throughout their day-to-day lives to document instances of violence, home demolition, and displacement.
It began as one of the “calmer days,” Mariam remembers. Then, there was a push up the mountain by protesters and tear gas thrown by Israeli forces. Palestinian protesters had barely finished praying when soldiers advanced on them, Oren Ziv, an Israeli journalist with the outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call, told Mother Jones. “The army was dispersing the demo with tear gas and live ammunition at the start”— soldiers firing bullets from the very beginning.
Mariam, Eygi, and another volunteer ran downhill to take shelter behind olive trees. A group of teenage boys farther up the road shouted at the soldiers on top of the hill. What was left of the protest, Mariam said, dispersed, and things quieted down as protesters cleaned tear gas out of their eyes.
About 20 minutes later, shots rang out once more. A bullet reportedly hit a Palestinian teenager in the leg. Another hit Eygi in the head.
Mariam rode in the ambulance with her to Rafidia hospital in Nablus, where, according to the hospital director, Eygi was declared dead. “We were just standing there, clearly visible to the Israeli army,” Mariam said. Because women from Beita rarely come to the protests, it was, to Mariam, clear to the soldiers that Eygi was an international volunteer. She thinks the purpose was obvious: “It was an intentional shot.”
The United States has not made that same determination. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said the government takes “the safety and security of American citizens incredibly seriously.” Shortly after Eygi’s killing, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “No one should be shot and killed for attending a protest.”
But US government statements have stopped short of criticism of Israel. The State Department has said it will wait for Israel to investigate and determine what happened that day. An initial press release from the Israel Defense Forces suggested that the gun was not aimed at Eygi, but at an “instigator” of what they describe as a “violent riot.” The IDF has said it is conducting a formal investigation and has not said when findings might be available.
“She was a human being. She wasn’t a symbol. She had a life. She has people that are in deep pain because of what’s happened, and the inaction of our government only deepens that pain.”
“I mean, the secretary of state himself called Aysenur’s killing unprovoked and unjustified,” Eygi’s husband, Hamid Ali, told Mother Jones. “Why are we allowing the country that admitted to killing my wife to conduct their own investigation on themselves? In what situation does that make sense?”
A month after Eygi’s death, I began to speak with her fellow protective presence activists, many of whom have remained in the West Bank as the olive harvest—always a season of increased violence—begins. The US government response has disillusioned them. It is now clear, they say, that the US has no interest in protecting them if doing so would mean critiquing Israel and perhaps would rather that they just go away.
“The Israeli authorities now are just trying to get rid of us,” Mariam said.
Noah, another volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement—the activist group that brought Eygi to the West Bank—says they feel similarly horrified by the US response. (Noah’s name, like Mariam’s, has been changed for their safety.) Noah helped Eygi coordinate her travel, texting her about picking out a SIM card and planning her flights. After the shooting, Noah was left to notify Eygi’s family when she died.
“They murdered Aysenur,” Noah told Mother Jones. “And somehow, they’re getting away with it because the United States is not willing to take a stand for Aysenur or for all the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been murdered by Israel.”
The first time President Joe Biden addressed Eygi’s death, he said, “Apparently, it was an accident.” (A Biden administration official told Mother Jones, “He did not misspeak, that’s what the Israeli investigation concluded.”) A day later, he called the death “unacceptable,” a “tragic error”—but he promised the Israeli army would investigate its own soldiers. Turkey, the country where Eygi spent her early childhood and held dual citizenship, has pushed for an independent investigation. In the month since, there has been little further US response.
Over the past four years, at least 15 Palestinian protesters have been killed on that hillside where Eygi was shot.
Ziv, the Israeli reporter, called the US response naive. “The army doesn’t really want to investigate itself,” he said. “If they were under real pressure, they would have published something like, ‘We detained a soldier, we investigated a soldier, we took their weapons,’ [and] I think, if there was real pressure from the US, they could have done that.”
For Eygi’s family and supporters, that is not enough. More than 100 members of Congress, led by Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Adam Smith. (D-Wash.), are pushing the US government to conduct an independent investigation to determine whether what happened that day constitutes a homicide. “I have had numerous briefings with State Department officials, and I have been in close touch with Eygi’s family, as her father is my constituent,” Jayapal wrote in a statement October 9. “I am frankly appalled with the lack of movement on this case.”
The State Department has been in contact with Eygi’s family since her death, and a Biden administration official told Mother Jones on Monday that the White House had reached out to her family. Earlier this year, Biden said, “If you harm an American, we will respond.” But as of Thursday, Eygi’s husband said he has heard nothing from Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris.
“We were expecting to hear from either the president or the vice president by now, especially since they have expressed, from their statements, that this was something that shouldn’t have happened,” Ali told Mother Jones. “It’s kind of hurtful to have not heard from them.”
IDF violence against Palestinians and their supporters in the West Bank is rarely investigated. The Israeli anti-occupation nonprofit Yesh Din reports that between 2017 and 2021, the Israeli military received 409 reports alleging a soldier killed a Palestinian. Only three resulted in indictments.
Protective presence activists know their work is dangerous. “But it’s not a suicide mission,” Noah told me. “You don’t go there expecting to be killed.”
Noah often thinks about how when soldiers and settlers do harm to Americans in the West Bank, they might be using American guns to do so. “Every time someone’s shot in the West Bank, it’s almost certainly weapons that were…originally purchased from the US or purchased with money from the US,” Noah said.
Although it’s unclear what type of gun was used to kill Eygi, IDF soldiers have over the years shot at other protesters with .22-caliber Ruger rifles manufactured in the United States and used for “riot control.”
As Israel’s war on Gaza expands into Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank are getting less attention—even as they increase their violence. International Crisis Group, a think tank that monitors conflict globally, stated in a major report that there have been over 1,000 documented instances of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank in the past year in which over 1,300 Palestinians have been driven from their homes.
“We do hope that, with our presence, there’s a bit less violence from the army,” said Mariam, the volunteer who was with Eygi as she died.
But the Palestinians of Beita tell her to be mindful that her international status is not a cure. “They always warn us to be careful, and they don’t want us to get injured, because they know that once you’re in the West Bank, the Israeli army doesn’t really differentiate,” she said.
Eygi was not the only American shot by Israeli forces in the West Bank this year. Tawfic Abdel Jabbar and Mohammad Alkhdour—both 17-year-old US citizens—were killed in the West Bank in 2024. On each occasion, the US government has condemned the killings without launching investigations. Daniel Santiago, a teacher from New Jersey volunteering with the protective presence group Faz3a, was shot in the leg on August 9 in Beita. Over the past four years, at least 15 Palestinian protesters have been killed on that hillside where both Santiago and Eygi were shot, according to human rights research group Al-Haq; thousands more have been injured.
Santiago is now back home recovering from his wounds. He wrote in a recent op-ed that his hopes for an official US reprisal for his injury by a foreign army are vanishingly slim: “Through the power of our passports and our phones, we hoped to document their crimes and provide a buffer between Palestinians and Israeli forces. But as we’ve seen over the last year, the blood of non-Israelis is not only meaningless, it is praised and humored. International outrage is either non-existent or fleeting to the point of insult.”
Joshua, a PhD candidate studying settler violence, traveled to the South Hebron Hills—a few hours’ drive from where Eygi was killed—in February of this year with the protective presence group the Center for Jewish Nonviolence. Since October 7, 2023, Joshua says, the distinction between settler and soldier has faded: These days, he refers to the armed men in IDF fatigues who patrol the West Bank as settler-soldiers, eliding the distinction altogether. Some are active-duty soldiers, others reservists—or even heavily armed civilians living in the West Bank’s settlements and outposts.
“Something new is happening,” he said, “which is that the near-complete immunity granted to nonstate settler actors [has] allowed them to basically do anything they want, including put on military garb and patrol the place and arrest people and harass people with no consequence.”
Israeli politicians have continually said foreigners in the West Bank are the ones creating the violence, calling them violent anarchists or terrorists. That rhetoric, promoted by ministers like Itamar Ben-Gvir—who established a new police team specifically to monitor left-wing activists in April, calling it “the team for handling the anarchists”—was used not only to threaten the foreign activists, but the Palestinians they work with. “Settlement emergency squads” and civilian settlers have been furnished with military-grade weapons by Ben-Gvir’s decree.
“If you come back with these anarchists, we’re going to shoot you,” Joshua remembered a settler threatening a Palestinian friend. He wondered if that meant his presence was making the village safer or putting it in more danger.
With the yearly olive harvest underway, the violence has not slowed down. On October 15, two American activists with Faz3a were arrested, charged with entering a closed military zone and “identifying with a terrorist organization,” and slated for deportation, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The next day, Hanan Abd Rahman Abu Salameh, a 59-year-old Palestinian woman, was killed while harvesting olives by someone in IDF fatigues. (Reporters initially were unable to clarify whether the killer was or was not an active-duty soldier.) Patel, the State Department spokesperson, called her death “incredibly concerning” but once again did not call for an independent investigation. An IDF spokesperson said that the incident is under investigation and that “the commanding officer present during the incident has been suspended from her duties.”
Palestinians going about their daily life are much more likely to end up on the wrong end of a soldier’s gun than American solidarity activists. The color of Eygi’s passport brought her death into the news—but that same day, not far from Beita, a 13-year-old Palestinian girl named Bana was killed by Israeli soldiers, too.
Eygi was given a hero’s funeral in Palestine. Back home in the US, her family is still waiting for a full response from the government. “What we’re asking for is not uncommon,” Ali said. “Americans were killed on October 7. Each one of their deaths was investigated, as it should have been. We know this is possible, and it’s something that should happen; I’m glad that it happened. It seems to be not as much of a priority to investigate Americans that are killed by Israel.”
Ali continued: “She was a human being. She wasn’t a symbol. She had a life. She has people that are in deep pain because of what’s happened, and the inaction of our government only deepens that pain.”
