CNN
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The funeral for American-Turkish activist Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, who was killed by Israeli gunfire in the West Bank last week, is underway in Didim, southwestern Turkey, where Eygi’s family home is located.
The activist’s body arrived in Turkey on Friday in a flat top coffin, wrapped in the Turkish flag and carried by soldiers, in a ceremony that is usually reserved for fallen troops.
Eygi’s coffin was placed outside Didim Central Mosque on Saturday, where funeral processions began and people gathered to pay their respects to the 26-year-old.
Eygi, who was born in Turkey but had US citizenship, was shot by Israeli forces while taking part in a weekly protest against an Israeli settlement near the Palestinian village of Beita. All Israeli settlements are considered illegal under international law.
She was a recent graduate of the University of Washington, and had been volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the same pro-Palestinian activist group as Rachel Corrie, a US citizen killed in 2003 while attempting to stop an Israeli bulldozer from demolishing Palestinian homes in Gaza.
US officials are looking into the deadly incident, and the Turkish government has said it holds Israel responsible for her death.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it was “highly likely” that Eygi was “hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire.”
In its initial inquiry into the incident, the IDF said that the shot was not aimed at the activist, but at “the key instigator” of a “violent riot” at the Beita Junction where it said Palestinians burned tires and hurled rocks at Israeli security forces. It didn’t name the alleged instigator.
US President Joe Biden called the shooting “totally unacceptable” and said there should be “full accountability” over her death.
But the ISM criticized Biden for refusing Eygi’s family’s demands for an independent and transparent investigation into her death.
She was remembered by her family as “a fiercely passionate human rights activist” who was “gentle, brave, silly, supportive, and a ray of sunshine.”
“Like the olive tree she lay beneath where she took her last breaths, Aysenur was strong, beautiful, and nourishing. Her presence in our lives was taken needlessly, unlawfully, and violently by the Israeli military,” they said in a statement.
