Middle East Crisis: American Woman Shot and Killed at West Bank Protest

U.S. officials said they were still gathering information about the circumstances of her death.

Ms. Eygi, who lived in Seattle, had recently arrived in Israel to join protests showing solidarity with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency reported that Ms. Eygi was born in Antalya, on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, in 1998.

In a statement on Friday, the Israeli military did not comment on a withdrawal but said its forces “are continuing to act in order to achieve the objectives of the counterterrorism operation.”

Palestinian residents who had been trapped in their homes for days — as Israeli troops and bulldozers roamed Jenin — ventured into the streets Friday and some who had fled the raid returned. They found their neighborhoods unrecognizable.

“God, I just collapsed,” said Kareeman Abu Naise, 30, when she saw video of her home taken by her father-in-law, who had returned to the neighborhood known as Jenin camp.

Ms. Abu Naise, who had fled the raid, heard from neighbors on Sunday that Israeli soldiers had fired a missile at their home, which had already been damaged by an Israeli bulldozer. That night, she said, she couldn’t sleep and cried for hours.

Seeing the damage on video — including the destroyed ground-floor living room where they had received guests — was even more difficult.

“Literally, everything we had was in that house. Our belongings, all our memories, the good and the bad,” said Ms. Abu Naise, a mother of two. Her husband, Muhammad, was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in 2022 as he walked home from work.

“Two of the most precious things to me were my husband and my house,” she said, “and now I’ve lost them both.”

The raids of the past 10 days, which included assaults on the city of Tulkarm, were among the deadliest in the territory in years. At least 39 people have been killed across the West Bank, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Seven children were among those killed, according to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, which said that the past week was the deadliest for Palestinian civilians in the West Bank since November.

Nearly three million Palestinians live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank. The Israeli military has described the raids that began Aug. 28 — a marked escalation over the near-nightly operations that had already become the norm there — as an effort to crack down on Palestinian armed groups and combat rising attacks against Israelis.

In its statement Friday, the Israeli military said that its forces had killed 14 members of armed Palestinian groups in Jenin over the past week and a half. It also said it had detained more than 30 people suspected of being members of the groups or of planning attacks, and had found weapons and explosives.

It also said it had carried out four airstrikes, a type of attack that had been rare in the West Bank before the Hamas-led assault on Israel last Oct. 7.

Some Jenin residents who had made dangerous escapes from their neighborhoods over the past 10 days returned Friday morning to survey the aftermath of the Israeli attacks. They were also able to check on loved ones whom they couldn’t reach because phone lines were down, residents said.

“Some are burying a martyr or visiting someone who has been wounded or checking on their home or shop,” said Nidal Naghnaghia, a resident who had fled Jenin with his family shortly after the raid began.

Many found homes so badly damaged that they are no longer habitable, and streets so ravaged by bulldozers that cars cannot pass, residents said.

Khulood Jabr, a 39-year-old mother of three, said it was as if people had been freed from their homes as they poured into the streets, surveying the damage. What they saw was as if nothing had been spared, she said.

“There is so much destruction, you can’t describe it. They didn’t leave any shop undamaged,” she said. “What crime did the owners of these shops commit? What do the electrical poles have to do with anything? What does the water have to do with anything?” she went on.

But Ms. Jabr added that she was heartened to see the people of the city banding together to rebuild, even as they feared Israeli forces would soon return.

Some residents were less hopeful, worrying that any attempt to rebuild would again be crushed in the next Israeli offensive.

“All of this will repeat itself, sooner or later,” said Ismail Bani Gharra, 25, who returned to Jenin on Friday. Of the Israeli forces, he said: “They will come again, there will be more raids, and more people killed.”

Anushka Patil, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.

Mr. Netanyahu has remained adamant that he will not agree to terms he believes would allow Hamas to regroup in Gaza, even as protests demanding a deal with Hamas have been held in Israel daily since Sunday, when the military announced the recovery of the bodies of Mr. Goldberg-Polin and five other hostages. The Israeli Ministry of Health said that autopsy reports showed all six had been shot at close range shortly before soldiers found their bodies.

The parents of Mr. Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli American, have been vocal advocates for a cease-fire deal and called urgently for an end to the war in Gaza at the Democratic National Convention in August. Their son also appeared in a video that Hamas released in April.

“No other family should go through what our family (and the families of the other recently executed hostages) have endured,” the couple said in their statement on Thursday.

Rights groups and international law experts say that a hostage video is, by definition, made under duress, and the statements in it are usually coerced. Israeli officials have called the videos a form of “psychological warfare,” and experts say their production can constitute a war crime.

The obstacles to a cease-fire agreement have not been resolved, with Israel and Hamas blaming each other for the impasse in talks.

“There’s not a deal in the making,” Mr. Netanyahu told Fox News in an interview released on Thursday. The Israeli leader continued to reject the contention that the primary stumbling block was his insistence on maintaining an Israeli troop presence in a strip of Gaza bordering Egypt called the Philadelphi Corridor, though he argued it was key to Israel’s security.

Hamas, for its part, has lost many of its fighters and leaders over the 11 months of the war, and the Gaza Strip, which it used to rule, has been devastated.

But the group is still holding out for a deal on its terms. A member of Hamas’s political bureau, Dr. Khalil al-Hayya, said in a statement on Thursday that any cease-fire agreement must include Israel’s “complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip” and demanded that mediators compel Israel to retreat from its latest conditions.

The Biden administration has said it believes a deal can still be reached. White House spokesman John Kirby conceded on Thursday that “there’s no formal negotiation going on at this time,” but said communication among Israel, Hamas and mediators continued.

Israel and Hamas are also at odds over arrangements for an exchange of prisoners for the hostages in Gaza, including the bodies of 35 who are believed to be dead. Hamas had agreed to the proposal months ago but recently added new demands for the release of hostages, asking for more Palestinian prisoners to be released in the opening phase of any agreement, two American officials said.

The killings of the six hostages has further complicated the issue: “There’s now fewer names on the list” of captives to be exchanged, the U.S. official said. And Hamas has suggested it may execute more hostages should Israeli forces get too close to where they are being held.

Relatives of the hostages are all too aware of this. On Friday, they will usher in Shabbat by lighting candles at what is now known as Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said. On Saturday evening, “following a particularly tumultuous and sad week,” they will gather again, the forum said, urging Israelis to rally with them “en masse and demand a deal.”