Israeli military says it likely killed American in West Bank

The Israeli military said Tuesday it was “highly likely” that its forces killed an American woman during a protest in the occupied West Bank last week. The United States said the shooting was “unprovoked and unjustified” and called for “fundamental changes” to Israel’s conduct, a rare direct rebuke of its close ally.

Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, a recent graduate of the University of Washington in Seattle, was shot and killed Friday during a demonstration against the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, the International Solidarity Movement said at the time.

Washington had urged Israel to investigate the circumstances around Eygi’s death and to ensure the findings were “thorough and transparent.” The incident unfolded as Israeli forces carried out a deadly dayslong military operation in other parts of the West Bank that it said targeted Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants.

The Israel Defense Forces said in a brief statement Tuesday that an initial inquiry found it was “highly likely” that Eygi was “hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire, which was not aimed at her, but aimed at the key instigator” of the protest.

The IDF said earlier that it had responded with fire toward a “main instigator” who was alleged to have been throwing rocks.

The IDF on Tuesday described the demonstration as a “violent riot in which dozens of Palestinian suspects burned tires and hurled rocks toward security forces at the Beita Junction.”

Eygi’s family said she had been peacefully demonstrating when she was killed and that video showed the bullet appeared to come from an Israeli military shooter.

The family called for an independent U.S.-ordered investigation and said an Israeli investigation would not be enough.

Calling Eygi’s killing “deeply concerning,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday that that U.S. had noted that the IDF had “found they were at fault,” following a preliminary investigation and had now “called for now a criminal investigation.”

“We know that’s an unusual step for the IDF. That’s not something that they do typically,” he said. “We’ll be watching this investigation very closely,” he added.

His comments came after Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday that the IDF inquiry “seems to show what eyewitnesses have said and made clear that her killing was both unprovoked and unjustified.”

Speaking during a trip to London, he added that “in our judgment, Israeli security forces need to make some fundamental changes in the way that they operate in the West Bank” and said Washington would be “making that clear to the senior-most members of the Israeli government.”

It was not clear whether there were any plans for a U.S.-led investigation.

The IDF added that “following the incident, an investigation was launched by the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division (MPCID). The findings will be submitted for review by the Military Advocate General’s Corps upon its conclusion.”

Israel has now submitted a request to carry out an autopsy, the IDF said, adding that it “expresses its deepest regret” over Eygi’s death.

It comes as Israel faces mounting scrutiny over a rise in deadly settler violence in the West Bank, with the International Court of Justice issuing an opinion in July that said the practices and policies deployed by Israel in its occupation of Palestinian territories were in breach of international law.

The court said Israel should cease all new settlement activities and evacuate settlers from Palestinian territories.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the ICJ’s ruling as “false,” saying that “the Jewish people are not conquerors in their own land,” referring to Jerusalem and the West Bank.

An FBI probe into the 2022 killing of another American in the West Bank, veteran Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, remains ongoing.

Israel had initially blamed Palestinian gunmen for the deadly shooting, but later admitted it was most likely that an Israeli soldier accidentally shot the journalist while she was covering Israeli raids in the territory.

Israel refused to cooperate with the FBI’s investigation and to date no one in the Israeli military has been prosecuted.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com