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- White House ‘disturbed’, calls for investigation
- Turkey says citizen was shot in head
- Follows rise in Israeli settler attacks in West Bank
Israeli troops shot and killed a Turkish-American woman who had been taking part in a protest against settlement expansion in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Friday, Palestinian and Turkish officials said.
The White House said it was deeply disturbed by the death of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi and called on Israel to investigate. Turkey’s foreign ministry said she was shot in the head, and placed blame on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for her death.
Palestinian officials described her as a 26-year-old activist who held both US and Turkish citizenship.
There was no immediate comment on the incident from Netanyahu’s office.
Fouad Nafaa, head of Rafidia Hospital in Nablus, told Reuters that Eygi arrived there in critical condition, with a serious head injury.
“We tried to perform a resuscitation operation on her, but unfortunately she died,” he said.
The Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, WAFA, said the incident occurred during a regular protest march by activists in Beita, a village near Nablus that has seen repeated attacks on Palestinians by Jewish settlers.
In a statement, Sean Savett, a spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council, said Washington was “deeply distributed by the tragic death of an American citizen” in the West Bank on Friday.
“We have reached out to the Government of Israel to ask for more information and request an investigation into the incident,” Savett said.
Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan condemned Eygi’s death, saying in a post on social media that Turkey “will continue to work in every platform to halt Israel’s policy of occupation and genocide”. Israel denies its actions in occupied Palestinian territories amount to genocide.
In a separate incident in the West Bank village of Qaryut on Friday, a 13-year-old girl was killed during clashes with Israeli forces, Palestinian health officials said, after settlers attacked two residents there.
WAFA quoted the girl’s father as saying that she was in their home when it was hit by gunfire.
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