The man set himself on fire on Wednesday, September 12. He was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital with severe burns and his current condition is unknown. Boston police told reporters they were investigating the situation. A witness said the man doused himself in gasoline and then set himself on fire, and CCTV footage shows him pacing back and forth while engulfed in flames.
He became the third person to set himself on fire outside the Israeli consulate since Israel launched a brutal attack on Gaza nearly a year ago.
The BDS group Boston shared a video posted by a man named Matt Nelson who told viewers he was going to perform an “extreme act of protest.” The man told witnesses that everyone is to blame for the fighting in the Gaza Strip.
“We are slaves to capitalism and the military-industrial complex. Most of us are too apathetic to care. My protest is a call to our government to stop supplying Israel with the money and weapons it is using to imprison and murder innocent Palestinians, to pressure Israel to stop its genocide in Gaza, and to support the ICC indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli government,” Matt Nelson said in the video.
The video itself does not show an act of self-immolation, but according to information on social media, this incident actually occurred.
Cursor previously reported that in February, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old active-duty US Air Force soldier, set himself on fire and died outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC. The US has not officially commented on the man’s self-immolation.
