Vigil for Aaron Bushnell held outside Israeli embassy in DC

More than one hundred people gathered outside the Israeli embassy in Washington on Monday evening to pay tribute to Aaron Bushnell, the Air Force member who self-immolated the day before.

Holding candles and photos of Bushnell, attendees commemorated the 25-year-old, who succumbed to his wounds soon after lighting himself on fire in the location where the vigil was held.

Bushnell was protesting Israel’s war in Gaza and the US complicity in the war, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

“I thought, what did it take for Aaron to do this,” Mary Neznek, a 75-year-old resident of Washington DC and attendee of the vigil, told MEE.

Neznek, a member of the anti-war group Veterans for Peace, said that her eldest brother was a US veteran in the Vietnam War, and later committed suicide as a result of being exposed to the Agent Orange chemical.

“Aaron, I identified with immediately in a different way. And I send my love to his family, I can’t imagine what they're going through,” she said.