US AIRMAN DIES AFTER SETTING HIMSELF ON FIRE IN GAZA PROTEST
▶ Serviceman says he will ‘no longer be complicit in genocide’ outside the Israeli embassy in Washington
A member of the US Air Force died after he set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington in a protest against Israel’s war in Gaza, a military official told The National yesterday.
“My name is Aaron Bushnell. I’m an active duty member of the United States Air Force,” the man said in a video he recorded right before he set himself on fire.
“I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” he said in the video, seen by The National.
As he walked towards the embassy, Mr Bushnell, 25, said he was about to engage in an “extreme act of protest”. He then set himself on fire, while repeatedly shouting “Free Palestine”.
In the video, emergency services could be seen attempting to put out the fire.
First responders attended a report of a man on fire shortly before 1pm on Sunday, the DC Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department confirmed to The National.
By the time the emergency services arrived, the flames had already been put out by US Secret Service officers.
Mr Bushnell was taken to a local hospital with “critical, life-threatening injuries”, a representative of the fire department said.
He died shortly after due to the wounds he sustained.
Authorities cordoned off the scene and police vehicles blocked both entrances to the street in the Cleveland Park neighbourhood where the embassy is located.
Police officers scoured the ground for evidence hours after the incident occurred.
Metropolitan Police said the bomb squad had been called to the scene in response “to a suspicious vehicle that may be connected to the individual”.
The Israeli embassy said Mr Bushnell was not known to them and “no embassy staff were injured” during the incident.
According to a profile on LinkedIn that matched Mr Bushnell’s description, the soldier was based in San Antonio, Texas, and was an “aspiring software engineer”.
His profile said he had been in the Air Force since 2020 and was currently a DevOps engineer, the person responsible for the operation of a company’s IT infrastructure.
After not publishing anything on Facebook since 2018, Mr Bushnell posted a link on the social media site to the live video feed of his protest.
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘what would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now,” Mr Bushnell wrote in the post.
This is not the first act of self-immolation outside an Israeli mission in the US since the war in Gaza started. In December, a woman set herself on fire in front of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta, Georgia, in what law enforcement said was an “extreme political protest”.
A Palestinian flag was found at the scene.
The war in Gaza began when Hamas militants entered southern Israel and killed about 1,200 people and took another 240 hostages, according to Israeli authorities.
The ensuing Israeli invasion of Gaza has resulted in the deaths of more than 29,700 Palestinians, according to health authorities in the enclave.
The rising death toll and the threat of the displacement of Palestinians from the enclave has led to an international outcry and calls for an immediate ceasefire.
The US has been by far Israel’s biggest supporter throughout the more than four-month-long military campaign, vetoing three UN resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire and supplying the country with weapons and ammunition.
Demonstrators regularly interrupt addresses by President Joe Biden and other officials demanding a ceasefire.
Many significant protests have been held in major cities across the country.
The US has been working with Egypt and Qatar to try to broker an agreement that would lead to Hamas releasing the remaining hostages in exchange for an extended pause in fighting.
On Sunday, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said Washington, Cairo and Doha had reached an understanding with Israel on what the “basic contours” of a deal might look like.
Mr Sullivan told CNN that the proposal must now be sent to Hamas.
Many of us ask ourselves, ‘what would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now AARON BUSHNELL
US airman
Protests against Israel’s war in Gaza have become a near-daily occurrence in the US, whose government has up to now backed Israel’s campaign unequivocally. On Sunday, however, the country witnessed the most shocking demonstration yet, when a US Air Force serviceman set himself alight outside the Israeli embassy in Washington.
The man was on fire for an entire minute, shouting “Free Palestine” between screams of agony as police officers rounded on him with their guns raised, ordering him – inexplicably – to “get on the ground”. In what appeared to be a moment of sudden clarity, a security guard at the scene yelled to other responding officers: “I don’t need guns – I need fire extinguishers!”
The serviceman died in hospital from his injuries. Meanwhile, efforts to forge a peace in Gaza continue. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised on Sunday that whatever the outcome of talks to secure a humanitarian ceasefire, his government will press on with plans to attack the Gazan city of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinian civilians are sheltering.
The ceasefire talks, taking place between Israel, the US, Egypt and Qatar, are making progress, according to US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.
The countries’ representatives met in Paris on Sunday and “came to an understanding”, according to Mr Sullivan, about “what the basic contours of a hostage deal for a temporary ceasefire would look like”.
Any pause in fighting would present a valuable opportunity for humanitarian aid to reach beleaguered Palestinian civilians. And the release of hostages held by Hamas would be good news; they should never have been taken in the first place.
But Mr Netanyahu’s assertion that a deal would simply “delay” his designs on Rafah, coupled with the US’s insistence on any ceasefire being “temporary”, gives plenty of cause for alarm.
If the primary motivation driving Israel’s war is the release of hostages, then it should seize the opportunity in the deal under discussion to end hostilities in exchange for their release. If the reasoning behind the war is something else – the “total destruction of Hamas”, as Mr Netanyahu has previously said, or some unspecified amount of revenge for Hamas’s October 7 attacks – then a drawn-out conflict would surely be on the horizon.
That would put at risk the gains of any truce agreement and more. During a meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Amman on Sunday, Jordan’s King Abdullah warned that a continuation of the war into Ramadan would “raise the danger of the expansion of the conflict”, with wider ramifications in the region.
Washington should take heed of that message as it gauges how to manage its junior ally’s bellicosity amid ceasefire talks. It should pay even closer attention to the growing discontent in America itself over a pro-war policy that becomes more inexplicable by the day.