On Wednesday night a man reportedly lit himself on fire outside the Israeli consulate in Boston. They were taken to Massachusetts General Hospital with severe burns, and their current condition is unknown. Boston police told reporters that they are investigating the situation.
A witness said the man poured gasoline over himself before lighting himself on fire and surveillance footage shows him walking back and forth covered in flames.
He is the third person to self-immolate outside an Israeli consulate since Israel began its brutal assault on Gaza nearly one year ago.
The group BDS Boston shared a YouTube video uploaded by a man named Matt Nelson who tells viewers that he is about engage in an “extreme act of protest.” The video does not show the actual act.
“We are all culpable in the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” he tells viewers. “We are slaves to capitalism and the military industrial complex. Most of us are too apathetic to care. The protest I’m about to engage in is a call to our government to stop supplying Israel with the money and weapons it uses to imprison and murder innocent Palestinians, to pressure Israel to end the genocide in Gaza, and to support the ICC indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of the Israeli government.”
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“A democracy is supposed to serve the will of the people, not the interests of the wealthy,” he continues. “Take the power back. Free Palestine.”
Mondoweiss could not independently verify the identity of the person who reportedly self immolated.
In February Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old active-duty soldier in the United States Air Force, lit himself on fire and died outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C.
“I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” said Bushnell, who videotaped his self-immolation. “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
“Free Palestine!,” he yelled while the flames engulfed his body.
“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,” Bushnell wrote in a Facebook post the morning of his death.
In December 2023 a demonstrator self-immolated outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta. Police confirmed that it was a political protest and a Palestinian flag was found nearby, but no further details about the incident have been revealed.
Since last October, tens of thousands of Americans have protested the genocide in Gaza and the Biden administration’s support for the bombings.
According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, more than 41,118 people, including nearly 16,500 children, have been killed in Gaza. However, the actual numbers are undoubtedly much higher.