Rachel Corrie's Parents Urge Probe Into Israel's Killing of American Activist Ayşenur Eygi

The parents of Rachel Corrie—the American activist crushed to death by a U.S.-supplied Israeli military bulldozer in 2003 in the illegally occupied West Bank—this week called for an independent investigation into the Israel Defense Force's killing last week of a Turkish American Palestine defender who was volunteering in the territory.

Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, a 26-year-old who recently graduated from the University of Washington, was volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM)—of which Corrie was a member—when she was shot in the head, allegedly by an IDF sniper, during a demonstration in Beita against Israel's illegal apartheid settlements.

Eyewitnesses said Israeli forces killed Eygi with "a deliberate shot to the head" for no reason.

While admitting that it is "highly likely" that Israeli troops killed the young woman, IDF officials called the killing "unintentional," claiming the fatal shot "was not aimed at her, but aimed at the key instigator of... a violent riot in which dozens of Palestinian suspects burned tires and hurled rocks" at occupation forces.

Cindy and Craig Corrie, Rachel's parents, told The Guardian Wednesday that Eygi's killing reopened old wounds.

"You feel the ripping apart again of your own family when you know that's happening to another family. There's a hole there that's never going to be filled for each of these families," Craig Corrie told the British newspaper.

"It's very personal," he added. "This one, you know, is very close, and there's so many similarities."

During a Monday interview with Democracy Now! co-host Amy Goodman, Cindy Corrie said news of Eygi's killing was "very disturbing and emotional for us."

"It's a parent's nightmare," she added. "And so, Friday morning, knowing that there was another family... who was getting that same kind of news was just very, very disturbing. And we continue to just feel deeply about what that family is experiencing right now."

U.S. President Joe Biden was widely denounced Tuesday after repeating an IDF claim that Eygi was accidentally killed when a bullet "ricocheted off the ground."

While calling Eygi's killing "totally unacceptable" and "unprovoked and unjustified," Secretary of State Antony Blinken has signaled that there will be no U.S. investigation of the incident, prompting Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)—the only Palestinian American member of Congress—to lament that the Israeli military "can kill Americans and get away with it."

Human rights defenders argue that the U.S. government repeatedly fails to hold Israel accountable or demand justice when it kills Americans. In addition to Corrie and Eygi, Israeli occupation forces have killed U.S. citizens including Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh, whose killing was deemed intentional by multiple investigations.

An elderly Palestinian American man, Omar Assad, died in January 2022 after Israeli occupation forces dragged him from his vehicle and then blindfolded, gagged, and handcuffed him during a traffic stop in Jiljilya.

No one has been punished for either of these killings.

This year, Israeli forces have killed at least three Americans in the West Bank alone.

As Truthout's Sharon Zhang reported Tuesday:

In January, an Israeli settler and Israeli soldiers killed 17-year-old Tawfiq Ajaq, shooting him in the head while he was on his way to a barbecue in a local grove. Israeli military vehicles prevented an ambulance from reaching him for 15 minutes, and he was pronounced dead on arrival at a medical facility. Ajaq was born in Louisiana, and had only moved to the West Bank nine months prior.

Then, just weeks later, Israeli forces killed Mohammad Khdour, shooting him in the head while he was driving to a hillside where people often held barbecues. Khdour was 17 years old and a senior in high school who hoped to return to the U.S. to study law when he graduated.

"If you're the U.S., you know that there's going to be no accountability from the Israeli side," Bill Van Esveld, the acting Israel/Palestine associate director for Human Rights Watch, told The Guardian. "So the reason [the U.S.] is not pursuing it in cases where there's clear, credible evidence from credible sources of unlawful use of force, lethal force... the only explanation for that is political."

Craig Corrie told Goodman that "it's upsetting to our family to hear our State Department again, and I would expect them to say, that they are trying to find out the facts and looking to Israel for that."

"Israel does not do investigations, they do cover-ups," he stressed.

"Our family worked for an investigation into Rachel's killing, and we wanted some consequences out of that," Corrie added. "And we hoped—even though we didn't know the names of the people that would be killed in the future, we hoped that that would stop and it would not happen."

IDF officials denied intentionally killing Corrie, despite court testimony from army officers that Corrie and other activists were legitimate military targets who were "doomed to death" for resisting Israeli occupation forces during the Second Intifada, or general Palestinian uprising.

The IDF called Corrie's death a "regrettable accident" while blaming the ISM activists for their own harm because they had placed themselves "in a combat zone."

Another ISM campaigner, Tom Hurndall, was shot in the head by an IDF sniper in the West Bank as he attempted to rescue Palestinian children from an Israeli tank that was firing in their direction. The shooting—which occurred a month after Corrie's killing—left Hurndall in a coma; he died nine months later in a hospital in his native Britain. Hurndall's killer was convicted in an Israeli court of manslaughter and served six years of an eight year prison sentence.

While Rachel Corrie once wrote that she felt protected by "the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed U.S. citizen," there were no such difficulties, just as there were no repercussions after Israeli warplanes killed 34 American sailors and wounded 173 others during a 1967 attack on the USS Liberty—an attack numerous top U.S. officials believed was deliberate.

Cindy and Craig Corrie sued Israel over their daughter's killing. Their case was dismissed in 2012, with the presiding judge ruling that the activist's death was the "result of an accident she brought upon herself."

Cindy Corrie told Goodman that Blinken—then a national security adviser to then-Vice President Biden—told them in 2010 that there had "not been a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation" into Rachel's case.

Craig Corrie called for more than just an investigation into Eygi's killing.

"There needs to be consequences," he told Goodman. "These are American weapons that are being used. That's against U.S. law, and it should be stopped."