A U.S. Air Force member has died after self-immolating outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., in an apparent protest of the Israel-Hamas war, U.S. officials said.
Police identified the aviator as 25-year-old Aaron Bushnell of San Antonio, Texas.
Bushnell in military uniform He filmed himself shouting “Free Palestine” before falling to the ground.
In a livestream, Bushnell called Israel's crackdown in the Gaza Strip a “genocide” and said what he was doing was not as extreme as the suffering of Palestinians.
he then He put down his cell phone, poured liquid from a water bottle over his head, and set himself on fire.
The District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department responded to a report of a person starting a fire outside the embassy just before 1 p.m. Sunday. However, by the time firefighters arrived, the fire had been extinguished by Secret Service agents.
bushnell The man was taken to a hospital with life-threatening injuries, where he later died, according to D.C. Fire and EMS.
An Air Force spokesperson confirmed that Bushnell is an active duty Air Force officer.
Bushnell is also an “aspiring software engineer,” according to his LinkedIn page, and worked for a San Antonio-based company called DevOps from March 2023 to this month.
NBC reached out to the company and spoke with two staff members, but the company declined to put reporters in touch with a spokesperson.
Bushnell posted a link to Twitch.TV's “Free Palestine” channel on his Facebook page at 10:54 a.m. Sunday, but it has since been deleted. Just before that, he posted something like a call to action.
“Many of us wonder, 'What would I do if I lived in a time of slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What if my country committed genocide? , I like to ask myself, 'What would I do?'” the post reads. “The answer is, you're doing it. You're doing it now.”
Afterwards, several people expressed their condolences in the comments section of the post.
The Israeli embassy said no staff were present. I was injured.
The incident occurred amid a four-month war between Israel and Hamas.
The incident follows a similar incident in December in which a woman self-immolated outside the Israeli consulate building in Atlanta. A Palestinian flag was recovered from the scene, and police described the incident as an “extreme political protest.”
Multiple protests have occurred since Hamas launched an attack on Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking about 240 hostages. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, nearly 30,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began.
On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office announced that the Israeli military had presented a plan to the war cabinet to evacuate civilians from the “combat zone” of Gaza. This came as Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke about plans for a ground assault on Rafah, Gaza's southernmost city along the Egyptian border, where one million Palestinians seek safety.
International officials, including UN Secretary-General António Guterres, have warned of a full-scale Israeli attack on Rafah, citing security concerns and disrupting the flow of aid to Palestinians seeking refuge in Rafah.
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