When Cindy and Craig Corrie heard about the death of Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, the American-Turkish woman killed at a protest in the occupied West Bank last week, it reopened a 21-year-old wound. “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 said.
In 2003, their daughter Rachel was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer during a protest in Rafah against the demolitions of homes in Gaza. This week, the couple have joined a chorus of human rights advocates calling for an independent investigation into Eygi’s death, saying that they feared her case would go unpunished like their daughter’s.
“It’s very personal,” said Craig, whose daughter – like Eygi – was an idealistic, politically engaged young college graduate from Washington state and a member of the International Solidarity Movement, a pro-Palestinian organisation. “This one, you know, is very close, and there’s so many similarities.”
The couple have lobbied for decades to demand justice in Rachel’s case, in which the Israeli military exonerated itself and the US failed to launch its own investigation. In 2015, the Israeli supreme court ruled against the Corries in a lawsuit that sought to hold Israel liable.
Ticking off the names of activists and journalists who have died in Gaza and the West Bank since the early 2000s, the couple argued that each unpunished killing made the next one more likely.
“If you talk about things changing, I think they’re changing for the worse,” said Craig Corrie. “In our family, our motive for doing the work we’ve done … was to try to keep this from happening to another person and [we see] the failure of that to happen.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Tuesday that an initial inquiry into Eygi’s death had concluded it was “highly likely” that she was “hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire”, indicating that the Israeli government accepted that its soldiers killed her but would be unlikely to prosecute anyone for her death.
Eygi’s family have pressed Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, for an independent investigation “into the unlawful killing of a US citizen and to ensure full accountability for the guilty parties”.
In response to the IDF’s initial findings, Blinken on Tuesday issued some of his sharpest remarks to date, calling Eygi’s killing “unprovoked and unjustified” and saying that “no one should be shot and killed for attending a protest”.
“In our judgment, Israeli security forces need to make some fundamental changes in the way that they operate in the West Bank, including changes to their rules of engagement,” he said. “It’s not acceptable, it has to change … And we’ll be making that clear to the senior most members of the Israeli government.”
Yet the state department has also indicated that it is not planning to lead an individual inquiry into the death. Biden has not called for an independent inquiry either despite the White House saying it was “deeply disturbed” by the killing. In a statement on Tuesday, the president said: “There must be full accountability. And Israel must do more to ensure that incidents like this never happen again.”
Cindy Corrie said Blinken had been promised changes to the IDF’s rules of engagement as far back as 2011, in an exchange of letters with the former Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren.
“If Blinken is saying today that the rules of IDF engagement need to change, yes obviously they do, but when it comes to protesters he was already directly promised changes by Oren/the Netanyahu government back in 2011,” she wrote in an email. “Seems relevant.”
Human rights activists argue that the US government has systematically failed to push the Israeli government to accept culpability in the deaths of activists and journalists, and has impeded or ignored investigations launched by international organisations such as the international criminal court or the United Nations.
“If you’re the US, you know that there’s going to be no accountability from the Israeli side,” said Bill Van Esveld, the acting Israel/Palestine associate director for Human Rights Watch. “So the reason [the US] 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.”
Sarah Leah Whitson, of Democracy for the Arab World Now, a non-profit advocacy group, said: “The penalty for unlawfully and unjustly shooting protesters dead isn’t future changes, right? The appropriate remedy is prosecution for those guilty, for those responsible for doing this.”
Even over high-profile killings, little has been done. Shireen Abu Akleh, a prominent Palestinian-American journalist who worked for Al Jazeera, was covering a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in 2022 when she was shot in the head by Israeli forces. A year after the killing and after the Israeli army had admitted there was a “high possibility” she was killed by an Israeli soldier, the IDF’s chief spokesperson, R Adm Daniel Hagari, went on television to say: “We are very sorry of the death of Shireen Abu Akleh.”
But no one was ever prosecuted for her death. A state department inquiry was inconclusive, saying the gunfire was likely to have come from IDF positions but it found “no reason to believe that this was intentional”. And in the case of two dozen journalists killed by Israeli military fire between 2000 and 2022, the Committee to Protect Journalists said that “despite numerous IDF probes, no one has ever been charged or held responsible for these deaths”.
ADD As a rule in cases ENDADD involving the deaths of foreigners or Palestinians, the Israeli military has investigated itself. Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organisation that monitors violence in the region, said that between 2017 and 2021, 1,260 legal complaints were made against the IDF, leading to a total of 248 criminal investigations, and just 11 indictments. In total, just 0.87% of incidents led to a prosecution, according to the group.
Corrie’s family praised the personal support they had received from top US officials and local representatives, including Blinken, who had encouraged the family to travel to Gaza and raise awareness of the case.
In 2015, they met the then undersecretary Blinken at the state department, who asked them: “What do you want me to do?” Once again, the family was left to find its own way forward to find justice in the case.
“And I remember he was engaged and personally helpful,” Craig added. “But frankly, if he can’t engage his institution, if they can’t do things, he’s not helping it.”
