Beneath the shade of an olive tree, Helen O’Sullivan and Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi found a moment of calm.
There, in the grove away from the road where minutes ago teargas was shot at Palestinian boys and international volunteers, the pair tried to catch their breath.
But their refuge was ruptured by a bullet, and Eygi slumped to the ground, face down.
O’Sullivan wrote in her journal later that day: “She was right beside me.”
“Not a threat. Young and beautiful. Brave. No weapons. She was murdered. It was a kill shot,” O’Sullivan alleged.
O’Sullivan, an Australian social worker, was attending a weekly protest against settlement expansion in the West Bank village of Beita, near Nablus, on 6 September, when Israeli troops fired the shot that killed Turkish American activist Eygi.
The Israel Defense Forces said it was “highly likely that she was hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire”, but her family have called for an independent investigation into her killing.
At least 41,870 Palestinians have been killed and 97,166 have been wounded in Gaza, according to the territory’s health ministry (though unofficial estimates are more than triple that), since Israel launched its bombardment on the strip following Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attacks that killed about 1,200 Israelis.
Illegal settler violence in the West Bank has escalated as well.
O’Sullivan’s testimony will join evidence Turkey is submitting as part of ongoing cases against Israel in the international court of justice and the international criminal court.
‘We were novices’
Six months ago, O’Sullivan was in a state of despair. For her, seeing the news of the killing of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom by an IDF strike, and the death of five-year-old Hind Rajab and her family in Gaza, were “a call to action”.
“Either I had to give up on humanity and feel like there was no hope, or I had to try and do something,” the Gold Coast social worker and grandmother tells Guardian Australia.
In September, she learned of International Solidarity Movement volunteers going to the West Bank to support Palestinians “through peaceful and civilian means against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories,” as put in a statement.
“That’s how I met Ayşenur,” she says.
O’Sullivan arrived in the West Bank on 3 September and trained in Ramallah.
Three days later, she and Eygi volunteered to provide support to Palestinian boys protesting settler expansion in Beita, at a weekly protest after prayers.
The two were “buddied up” and joined about eight other international volunteers. They understood settlers or soldiers were “less likely to be hostile openly if they thought that we were there with cameramen,” O’Sullivan says.
“I don’t think Ayşenur or I were fully cognisant of how brutal this could be.”
On the day Eygi was killed, she and O’Sullivan shared coffee and dates in a circle of Palestinian men. Young boys helped serve coffee before the men and boys went to pray in a nearby park.
“People were pointing out, just before we walked out, where they had spotted the soldiers up on the top of the hill,” O’Sullivan says.
“At that point, I just assumed they would watch us, we would protest with them, or they would get annoyed with us and send us on our way. I guess in my naivety, that’s what I thought would happen.”
She and Eygi stayed at the back of the group of volunteers, who stood watch as a group of less than 20 boys, aged between 13 and 18, shouted defiantly at soldiers about 200 metres away, O’Sullivan says.
“I don’t even think they got a chance to throw a rock at that point before the teargas came.”
O’Sullivan had never been teargassed before. It burned, and affected her vision. She and Eygi immediately fled for cover in an olive grove away from the protest group on the road.
“Then we heard a shot and someone yelled ‘live ammunition’.
“We retreated really quickly, running in olive groves downhill, with this rock … everywhere, and I slipped, and she helped me get up.”
In the chaos, O’Sullivan sprained her ankle – though she didn’t notice the pain at the time.
They kept running, hiding behind an olive tree for a couple of minutes as their breathing slowed.
“It was calm. We felt safe, and I guess still in shock.”
Then Eygi dropped to the ground.
“They shot her,” O’Sullivan says. “They shot her in the head.”
O’Sullivan bent down to her friend, rolled her over, and saw blood coming from the left side of her head.
“I could tell by her eyes that were open, and her right eye was looking in a completely different direction.”
An ambulance and two other volunteers accompanied Eygi to a hospital in Nablus.
O’Sullivan followed by car. On the way, she received a text message that Eygi had died.
“We were just novices,” she says.
“We would stay together. That was the plan. She was my buddy, and our job was to protect each other. But I guess I failed that, right?”
‘I don’t know why they chose Ayşenur’
O’Sullivan didn’t expect the situation to escalate. But it was “seeing that same brutality played out again and again in occupied West Bank” that she struggles to comprehend.
She says a 13-year-old Palestinian girl named Bana was killed on the same day by Israeli forces in a separate incident.
“We did not know that while we were grieving the loss of our friend surrounded by the attention of many journalists, Bana’s family were quietly grieving nearby,” O’Sullivan says.
“This, I soon learned, was part and parcel of daily life for Palestinians under occupation.”
O’Sullivan says she has never felt so angry in her life.
“The occupation force had immediately admitted and acknowledged they had shot,” she says. “But that it was an accident. They said the international volunteers were violent. And I know both are lies.”
When Eygi was shot, “we were nowhere near the chaos,” O’Sullivan says.
“We were in an olive grove, standing at the back. There were even volunteers in front of us – maybe they were more hidden, I don’t know. I don’t know why they chose Ayşenur.
“They would have known she was a volunteer. There weren’t any women protesters. They were young boys, and they were not hiding, they were, very differently, standing in the open air.”
Israel has repeatedly been accused of deliberately firing on journalists, aid and healthcare workers, and United Nations peacekeepers. A UN investigation found Israel broke international law when an Israeli tank fired two 120mm rounds at a group of “clearly identifiable journalists,” killing one, in Lebanon last year.
The incident in Beita was O’Sullivan’s first introduction to the West Bank, just a few days into her arrival. She stayed volunteering for another six weeks.
“I’m not a political analyst, and I’m not going to pretend to be,” she says. “But I am a mother, and a social worker.”
When she thinks of the Palestinian boys teargassed for protesting, she is struck by the fact that “they are younger than my children”.
“There were these well-equipped soldiers, state-of-the-art equipment provided by the west, standing at the vantage point of being at the top of the hill.
“And the boys, it was their defiance and their courage, with nothing more than a rock in their hands and a voice to shout with.”
And when she thinks of Eygi, she remembers “what she came here to do”.
“If the world can’t see that this is an atrocity, and this is one we should all be standing up and speaking out against, then I think I would go back to that place of despair where I was six months ago.”
Among the international volunteers was a common hope that, after leaving the West Bank, “we would go back and be able to tell the story of what we witnessed”.
“I know that is what Ayşenur wanted to do. So I am hoping that I can do it for both of us.”
