26 February 2024
A US Air Force soldier who set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington on Sunday in protest against the war in Gaza has died, the Pentagon said Monday.
The active-duty airman was identified as 25-year-old Aaron Bushnell, of San Antonio, Texas, an Al Jazeera report said.
According to the Washington Fire Department, emergency responders on Sunday had rushed to the scene just before 1:00 pm (1800 GMT) in response to a “call for person on fire outside the Israeli Embassy.”
The fire officials rushed to the incident site to find that officers from the Secret Service had already extinguished the fire. The soldier was initially transported to hospital with “critical life-threatening injuries,” the fire department noted.
An AFP report quoted an Air Force spokeswoman as saying that the unnamed “individual involved in Sunday’s incident succumbed to his injuries and passed away last night.”
“I will no longer be complicit in genocide [in Gaza]. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” the man apparently said before setting himself alight and repeatedly shouting “Free Palestine!”
