“A Horrifying Undercount” – True Gaza Death Toll Could Be Many Times Higher

By Ralph Nader, Amy Goodman , Juan Gonzalez

September 11, 2024

Source: Democracy Now!


Former presidential candidate and celebrated consumer advocate Ralph Nader discusses Israel’s war on Gaza, the U.S. presidential election and more. Nader’s latest article, “Exposing the Gaza Death Undercount,” can be read in the Capitol Hill Citizen, which he also founded. The official death toll in Gaza has been suspended at around 40,000 for months, as Israel’s devastation of the territory makes it increasingly difficult to properly recover and identify the dead. Nader says that the true cost in Palestinian lives could already be “well over 300,000,” and that “if the true count was known, it would devastate the mythology that the Biden administration and Congress are furthering, that the Israeli government does not purposely target civilian populations.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We continue to look at Israel war’s on Gaza, where the official death toll has topped 41,000 Palestinians, though that could be a vast undercount that doesn’t include those who remain trapped in the rubble and the people and children who have died due to chronic illnesses, infectious diseases spreading across Gaza.

Over the past 11 months, Israel has destroyed Gaza’s health system and other crucial infrastructure, placed a blockade on medications and other urgent aid. More than 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza also risk imminent famine, with children starving at a record rate. The U.N. humanitarian aid chief Martin Griffiths has said life is “draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed,” unquote.

Even some Biden administration officials have admitted the Gaza death toll could be significantly higher. This is Barbara Leaf, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, speaking last November.


BARBARA LEAF: In this period of conflict and conditions of war, it is very difficult for any of us to assess what the rate of casualties are. We think they’re very high, frankly. And it could be that they’re even higher than are being cited. We’ll know only after the guns fall silent. So, you know, we take in sourcing from a variety of folks who are on the ground. And so, I can’t stipulate to one figure or another, but I think that it’s very possible that they’re even higher than is being reported.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf.

The prestigious British medical journal Lancet has estimated the actual death toll could be 186,000 or even higher, roughly 8% of Gaza’s population. The report looks at how war leads to indirect deaths due to shortages of medical care, food, shelter and water.

This all comes as protests continue demanding the U.S. government immediately halt its military aid to Israel and calling on Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who’s debating Donald Trump tonight in Philadelphia, to shift her policies on Gaza.

For more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Ralph Nader, longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic, former presidential candidate four times. He’s the author of many books, including, most recently, Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country That Works for the People. Ralph Nader is the founder of the monthly print-only newspaper, Capitol Hill Citizen, where his front-page article in the latest issue is headlined “Exposing the Gaza Death Undercount.”

Let’s start with this undercount, what you are saying is so much higher, the death toll in Gaza, than what we understand.

RALPH NADER: Amy, this is a horrifying undercount, and it has political rationale for it. If the true count was known, it would devastate the mythology that the Biden administration and Congress are furthering, that the Israeli government does not purposely target civilian populations and, therefore, violate all kinds of U.S. laws, conditioning the shipment of weapons to Israel, and international laws.

So, I put together in this article in the Capitol Hill Citizen — people can go to CapitolHillCitizen.com and get it — the various probative evidence that shows that experts, who are blocked from getting additional data that the State Department has and is keeping secret — that the evidence shows that it’s well over 300,000. And it may double by the end of the year. In an article in The Guardian by the distinguished chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh titled “Scientists are closing in on the true, horrifying scale of death and disease in Gaza,” she estimates over 300,000 before the end of the year, pointing out, with The Lancet report that you mentioned, that The Lancet people used a very — quote, “used a very conservative estimate, but allowed that the number could easily be much higher.”

And so, why is this happening? Why are all sides, the anti-genocide side, the Israeli, the Hamas — why are they always using these figures? Because, for different reasons, it serves their political purposes. Hamas doesn’t want the true count to be known, because it will be assailed by its own people and its international allies as unable to protect its own people and provide shelters. Netanyahu, of course, wants it lowballed for obvious reasons, and Biden for the same reason.

So, what do these scientists see? They see a tiny enclave the geographical size of Philadelphia with 2.3 million people, crowded, already sick and destitute from years of Israeli illegal embargoes, high levels of anemia among the children before October 7th, and then, starting October 8th, the Israeli military issued the genocidal orders of no food, no water, no medicine, no electricity, no fuel, and they proceeded accordingly. And so, what these scientists are seeing are what’s called the empirical evidence, that people on social media are seeing and others. With over 130,000 bombs and missiles, plus daily tank shelling, ruthless sniper fire, there’s been massive destruction of apartment buildings, congested marketplaces, refugee camps, hospitals, over 150 health clinics, masses of families huddled in schools being blown up, ambulances being blown up, bakeries destroyed, schools, universities, mosques, churches, roads, electricity networks, critical water mains — just about everyone and everything.

And some people, partisans of Netanyahu, will say, “Oh, the Israeli government never targets civilians.” Historically, they’ve always targeted civilians. Go back to the early ’80s, when former Israeli ambassador and foreign minister Abba Eban wrote of Israel under then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin that Israel — and I’m quoting him — quote, “is wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention by name,” end-quote. And just a few years earlier, in the late ’70s, Israel’s leading military analyst, summing up remarks by the Israeli chief of staff, stated the following, quote, “The Israeli Army has always struck civilian populations, purposefully and consciously. The Army has never distinguished civilian [from military] targets … [but] purposefully attacked civilian targets,” end-quote.

And why is this important? Because to this day, all of the administration spokespeople are denying that Israel has targeted civilians, denying that Israel has violated international genocide laws, denying that they have violated six federal statutes conditioning shipment of weapons to foreign countries on recognizing human rights excessively. To this administration and to the Congress, all deaths of civilians are accidental. Blowing up schools sheltering refugees, well, that was a mistake. So that’s why it’s important, Amy and Juan, to get that estimate as reliably high as possible.

We are seeing possibly a million deaths before the end of the year. We have starvation. We have infectious diseases. All the doctors that you’ve had on Democracy Now! have provided the clinical evidence of what’s going on, 5,000 babies born every month into the rubble, contaminated water, horrific air pollution with heavy metals from the bombing, and no food. We’re led to believe by these 41,000 figures that 98% or more of the Palestinian population is still alive? I mean, what are they made of? Asbestos and steel? And as the doctors have said on your program, when they went back to the rubble and the broken hospitals, they didn’t meet anybody in Gaza who wasn’t sick or injured. There was an interview in February on Al Jazeera by a Gaza undertaker who’s doing this free of charge and crying every day with his assistants on the open graves. He says he’s buried 17,000 bodies, including 800 in one day, and that was back in February.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ralph, I wanted to ask you — in addition to the bombings and the killings of civilians, Israel has also refused to allow foreign press to come into Gaza and has systematically been killing those journalists, those Palestinians within Gaza who are reporting. Talk about this attack on the press, that really has not gotten much outrage in the West.

RALPH NADER: Yeah, I mean, how weak can you get as a president of the United States or member of Congress when you can’t even demand that Netanyahu let foreign and Israeli journalists, including U.S. journalists, into Gaza to freely report? He’s been blocking this for years. And the Israeli military has targeted, as you indicated, Palestinian journalists. They’ve killed over 165 of them, including, in addition, members of their own family, targeting apartments, for example. They’ve killed over 200 members of UNRWA, the U.N. relief. They’re out to destroy every relief center, every food — feeding center of UNRWA, education center.

I mean, this is — right now let’s put it in comparative terms here. More Palestinians have been killed since October 8th than have been killed by the U.S. in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden. That total death toll was about 235,000-240,000 people. And those deaths were in countries, Germany and Japan, with 160 million population. Here we only have 2.3 million population. And all you’ve got to do is read the Israeli press, read Haaretz, read the statements by —

AMY GOODMAN: We have five seconds, Ralph.

RALPH NADER: — 17 Israeli human rights groups.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, we want to thank you for being with us, longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic, four-time former presidential candidate. We’ll link to your article in the Capitol Hill Citizen, “Exposing the Gaza Death Undercount.”

That does it for our show. Watch tonight’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris at democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

The Live-Streamed Genocide in Gaza Exposes US Complicity for All to See

The spiritual death of the United States has been a long time coming. It’s not just the murder and destruction—it’s the arrogance and hypocrisy of it all.

By Omar Suleiman

September 11, 2024Z ArticleNo Comments5 Mins Read
Source: Middle East Eye
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Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 10 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants' surprise attack. 

Photo by Naaman Omar\ apaimages

With a military budget greater than the next 10 countries combined, the U.S. naturally remains an international hegemon.

But it’s not the benevolent empire it once sold itself as to the globe. Now, as it transitions from post-9/11 forever wars, yet continues to engage in, finance and manufacture the weapons of a genocide, America’s decades-long spiritual decline has hit rock bottom.

Recently, a man approached me after a lecture, asking: “What makes Gaza different?” He was referring to the simultaneous international attention and inaction on the occupation’s barbarity in Gaza.

Of course, there are religious implications—Muslims naturally revere Palestine as a holy land, as do Jews and Christians.

There are historical implications, too, including an extensive history of over seven decades of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, the continuous building of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, as well as an ever-growing list of Israeli human rights abuses.

But the biggest difference that came to mind was that every detail of this genocide is being broadcast. It’s a “live-streamed genocide”, as Blinne Ni Ghralaigh, an adviser to the South Africa team at the International Court of Justice, put it.


It’s televised on your phone, your computer screen, your social media. A healthy conscience can’t simply ignore the mutilated bodies of tens of thousands of dead Palestinian children.

“It’s the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time,” she said.

It’s televised on your phone, your computer screen, your social media. A healthy conscience can’t simply ignore the mutilated bodies of tens of thousands of dead Palestinian children.
Arrogance and hypocrisy

But this isn’t the first time the U.S. has been complicit in the murder of thousands of innocent civilians.

What if the victims of the American military machine in Afghanistan and, later, Iraq were able to livestream their own death and destruction?

How many massacres has the U.S. been proxy to or carried out itself? How many victims will never be mentioned?

In 2020, under the Freedom of Information Act, the The New Yorkersued the Navy, the Marine Corps and the U.S. Central Command in an effort to obtain images from the Haditha massacre of 2005, a civilian slaughter in which US Marines killed 24 Iraqi men, women and children.


The Haditha massacre is a microcosm of not just the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but the West’s brutal attempt to engineer artificial change, secure national security interests at the expense of local populations and impose its will in the Muslim world.

The youngest victims included a three-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy named Abdullah, shot in the head from six feet away.

After a long fight lasting four years, in March, the US military apparatus released the images of the bloodbath. The perpetrators remain unpunished.

The Haditha massacre is a microcosm of not just the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but the West’s brutal attempt to engineer artificial change, secure national security interests at the expense of local populations and impose its will in the Muslim world.

In an interview with Al Jazeera’s Centre Stage last week, Middle East Eye’s editor-in-chief, David Hearst, blasted the western world order amidst its complicity in Gaza.

“Nothing that the western [liberal] alliance has done in the last three decades has worked, and yet it’s still going on,” he said.


The Gaza genocide is an American one, and it is high time Americans came to terms with their government’s complicity.

From forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to Barack Obama’s “no boots on the ground” that fuelled a drone-strike heavy policy in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, the US’s spiritual death has been a long time coming.

And it’s not just the murder and destruction—it’s the arrogance and hypocrisy of it all.
Sinister defence

“They’re using extremely illiberal means to protect their liberalism, and they’re using it against Muslims,” Hearst added in his interview with Al Jazeera. “They wouldn’t dare to use that against Jews or synagogues.”

It is largely American bombs that have been dropped on the hospitals, mosques, churches and over 500 schools of Gaza.

It is an American backing of Israeli war crimes and human rights abuses that allows the occupation to continue its ongoing genocide, and it is this sinister defense of Israeli terror—often at the expense of its own citizens—that is putting the final nail in the coffin of America’s spiritual death.

For decades, Washington has remained silent and dismissive of Israel’s murder of American citizens, going to bat at State Department and White House briefings for the occupation against their own citizens.

It is an American backing of Israeli war crimes and human rights abuses that allows the occupation to continue its ongoing genocide…

In 2003, Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American activist, was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza. The bulldozer was an American one, sold to Israel through a Defense Department program.

In 2022, Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist, was killed by Israeli snipers in the West Bank in 2022.

Just this week, Israeli forces shot dead 26-year-old Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a Turkish-American taking part in protests against illegal Israeli settlements south of Nablus. Israeli officials stated they “would look into it,” a dismal response echoed for decades.

And the U.S. response will remain the same: a shoulder shrug, a disapproval devoid of consequence.

The U.S. is not a negotiator, arbitrator or by any means an objective voice vis-a-vis the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It is the raison d’etre.

The Gaza genocide is an American one, and it is high time Americans came to terms with their government’s complicity in the type of war crimes they so often associate with historical hegemonic rivals.

Israeli Tanks, Bulldozer Attack UN Convoy En Route to Support Polio Vaccination

By Sharon Zhang

September 12, 2024

Source: Truthout

Image by Ashraf Amra/Anadolu

Israeli forces detained and attacked a UN convoy on its way to support the polio vaccination campaign in northern Gaza this week, using tanks and bulldozers to terrorize the UN staff and firing their guns despite supposed agreements by Israeli forces that the polio campaign be safe from violence.

According to Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), the UN had coordinated the convoy’s travel in detail with Israeli forces. Despite this, the Israeli military held the convoy for over eight hours at a checkpoint as it was on its way to northern Gaza. None of the 12 UN staff involved were killed during the incident, but they were forced to return to base and were unable to complete their mission.

According to UN secretary-general spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric, Israeli soldiers pointed guns at staff while saying they wanted to detain two of them for questioning. Then, firing off their guns, they surrounded the convoy with tanks and bulldozers.

They then rammed the UN vehicles from the front and back, “compacting the convoy with UN staff inside,” Dujarric said. A bulldozer dropped debris on the lead vehicle in the convoy.

Staff were held at gunpoint and unable to leave; Israeli soldiers interrogated two of the workers and released them.

Lazzarini raised alarm on Monday that the incident made it unclear whether staff could continue the polio vaccination campaign in northern Gaza the next day, as the agency said the campaign was moving into its “most complex phase.” The UNRWA reported on Wednesday that it has been able to continue the campaign in northern Gaza “against all challenges and thanks to the dedication of our health workers.”

“This significant incident is the latest in a series of violations against UN staff including shootings at convoys and arrests by the Israeli Armed Forces at checkpoints despite prior notification. UN Staff must be allowed to undertake their duties in safety and be protected at all times in accordance with international humanitarian law. Gaza is no different,” said Lazzarini.

The UNRWA has reported that, as of Sunday, humanitarian workers have been able to vaccinate over 446,000 children in central and southern Gaza out of a total of 640,000 children under 10 years old in Gaza who need the vaccine. Lazzarini reported on Tuesday that the UNRWA has vaccinated an additional 77,000 children in northern Gaza.

Israel has supposedly agreed to brief pauses in deconflicted sites to allow the polio vaccine to be distributed, as experts warned that a polio epidemic could spread across the territory to Israel and elsewhere if it wasn’t stopped. Last month, officials reported that a 10-month-old baby had paralysis from poliovirus, caused by Israel’s genocide and disease campaign in Gaza.

The attack on the convoy raises questions about whether or not Israel is truly respecting their own pledge of deconfliction, or an agreement to avoid attacking certain spots for humanitarian aid purposes. Other attacks also suggest that Israel may be violating its deconfliction pledge.

On Tuesday, Israel struck a food stand in northern Gaza located between three deconflicted polio vaccination centers, killing five Palestinians, according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. The food stall was as little as tens of meters away from vaccination centers, the group said.

“We have also documented airstrikes in Southern Gaza that similarly undermine the crucial polio vaccination campaign,” Euro-Med Monitor said. “Additionally, Israel’s stopping and interrogating a UN mission yesterday indicate a clear tendency for the IDF to obstruct humanitarian and relief efforts.”

Israel has also directly turned deconflicted zones into combat zones. On Monday, Israel ordered a new evacuation order for four neighborhoods in northern Gaza that covered several polio vaccination sites, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for the occupied Palestinian territory reported.

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

by Jeffrey St. Clair

 September 13, 2024
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Aysenur Eygi after her graduation from the University of Washington in May. Photo courtesy of Aysenur Eygi Family.

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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IDF forces deploying near the children’s park in Beita, before firing on demonstrators after a Friday prayer service. Image obtained by Washington Post.

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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Biden falsely claiming that Aysenur was killed accidentally when an IDF sniper’s bullet “ricocheted off the ground and hit her.”

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.”

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.