Andrew Roth
The Guardian / September 11, 2024
But US president has still not called for an independent inquiry into the death of protester Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi.
Joe Biden has described the Israel Defense Force’s fatal shooting of the Turkish American protester Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi as “totally unacceptable” in his first extensive comments on her death.
In a statement on Wednesday, Biden said that Israel had “acknowledged responsibility” for Eygi’s death, but he stopped short of backing the demands put out by Eygi’s family and other human rights advocates for an independent inquiry into the fatal shooting of the American activist at a protest in the West Bank town of Beita last week.
“I am outraged and deeply saddened by the death of Aysenur Eygi,” Biden said in the statement. “Israel has acknowledged its responsibility for Aysenur’s death, and a preliminary investigation has indicated that it was the result of a tragic error resulting from an unnecessary escalation.”
“The US government has had full access to Israel’s preliminary investigation, and expects continued access as the investigation continues, so that we can have confidence in the result,” he continued. “There must be full accountability. And Israel must do more to ensure that incidents like this never happen again.”
In response, Hamid Ali, Eygi’s partner, said that Biden had not directly contacted the family and renewed calls for an independent inquiry in the case. “The White House has not spoken with us,” he said in the statement. “For four days, we have waited for President Biden to pick up the phone and do the right thing: to call us, offer his condolences and let us know that he is ordering an independent investigation of the killing of Ayşenur.”
The Israel Defense Forces said that the results of an initial inquiry showed that it was “highly likely that [Eygi] was hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire which was not aimed at her, but aimed at the key instigator of the riot”.
In response, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, had said that he would speak with senior Israeli officials and demand that the Israeli security forces “make some fundamental changes to the way they operate in the West Bank, including changes to their rules of engagement”.
Biden did not offer further specific information on what changes the US would demand from Israeli security forces. Previous deaths of American citizens in the region, including the shooting death of the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in Gaza in 2022, have also gone unprosecuted.
Kamala Harris also called the shooting that led to Eygi’s death “unacceptable and raises legitimate questions about the conduct of IDF personnel in the West Bank. Israel must do more to ensure that incidents like this never happen again.”
Biden, in brief comments to the press, suggested that Eygi had been killed by a bullet that had ricocheted off the ground as Israeli forces fired at protesters who the IDF claimed had turned violent.
But family members of Eygi, citing media reports and other research, have said they do not believe the shooting was an accident.
“President Biden is still calling her killing an accident based only on the Israeli military’s story,” Eygi’s family said in a statement after Biden and Harris’ remarks. “This is not only insensitive and false, it is complicity in the Israeli military’s agenda to take Palestinian land and whitewash the killing of an American.
“Let us be clear: an American citizen was killed by a foreign military in a targeted attack. The appropriate action is for President Biden and Vice-President Harris to speak with the family directly, and order an independent, transparent investigation into the killing of Ayşenur, a volunteer for peace.”
Andrew Roth is The Guardian’s global affairs correspondent
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‘So many similarities’: Rachel Corrie’s parents call for inquiry into death of Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi
Andrew Roth
The Guardian / September 11, 2024
Cindy and Craig Corrie say they fear Eygi’s death at West Bank protest will go unpunished like their daughter’s.
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 organization. “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 organizations 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”.
As a rule in cases involving the deaths of foreigners or Palestinians, the Israeli military has investigated itself. Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization 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.”
Andrew Roth is The Guardian’s global affairs correspondent
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Family of US activist shot dead by Israeli forces says Biden has not called
Reuters / September 11, 2024
Secretary of state and defence secretary decry fatal shooting of Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi in West Bank.
The family of the American activist Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi said on Tuesday that neither the White House nor Joe Biden had called to offer condolences.
Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, who is also a Turkish national, was shot dead last Friday at a protest march in Beita, a village near Nablus where Palestinians have been repeatedly attacked by far-right Jewish settlers.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and the defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, on Tuesday demanded an overhaul of Israeli military conduct in the occupied West Bank as they decried the fatal shooting of an American protester against settlement expansion, which Israel said was accidental.
Turkish and Palestinian officials said Israeli troops shot Eygi, a volunteer with the activist group International Solidarity Movement (ISM), during the demonstration. Palestinian officials say that Eygi was struck in the head, Reuters reports.
Israel’s military said on Tuesday that its initial inquiry found it was highly likely its troops had fired the shot that killed her but that her death was unintentional, and it voiced deep regret.
The US president later told reporters “it ricocheted off the ground” and a US official said that was the conclusion of the Israeli investigation, the results of which were presented to the United States on Tuesday.
Eygi’s family called Israel’s preliminary inquiry “wholly inadequate” and demanded an independent US investigation.
Hamid Ali, Eygi’s partner, in response to Biden’s comments, said her death “was no accident and her killers must be held accountable.
“The White House has not spoken with us. For four days, we have waited for President Biden to pick up the phone and do the right thing,” Ali said.
Blinken and Austin, in their strongest comments to date criticizing the security forces of Washington’s closest Middle East ally, described Eygi’s killing as “unprovoked and unjustified”. They separately said Washington would insist to the Israeli government that it makes changes to how its forces operated in the West Bank.
“No one should be shot and killed for attending a protest. No one should have to put their life at risk just for freely expressing their views,” Blinken told reporters in London.
“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.
“Now we have the second American citizen killed at the hands of Israeli security forces. It’s not acceptable,” Blinken said.
An Israeli government spokesperson declined to comment on Blinken’s remarks.
Austin spoke to the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, the Pentagon said late on Tuesday, adding he expressed “grave concern for the IDF’s responsibility for the unprovoked and unjustified death” of Eygi. He also urged Gallant “to re-examine the IDF’s rules of engagement while operating in the West Bank,” according to the Pentagon.
The Israeli military earlier said an investigation by the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division was under way and its findings would be submitted for higher-level review once completed.
“We’re going to be watching that very, very closely,” the White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby, told reporters, saying a criminal investigation was an unusual step by Israel’s military.
“We’re going to want to see where it goes now in terms of the criminal investigation and what they find, and if and how anyone is held accountable,” Kirby added.
In a statement, the Israeli military said its commanders had conducted an initial investigation into the incident and found that the gunfire was not aimed at her but another individual it called “the key instigator of the riot”.
“The incident took place during a violent riot in which dozens of Palestinian suspects burned tyres and hurled rocks towards security forces at the Beita Junction,” it said.
Israel has sent a request to Palestinian authorities to carry out an autopsy, it said.
“We are deeply offended by the suggestion that her killing by a trained sniper was in any way unintentional,” Eygi’s family said in a statement.
A surge in violent settler assaults on Palestinians in the West Bank has stirred anger among western allies of Israel, including the United States, which has imposed sanctions on some Israelis involved in the hardline settler movement. Tensions have been heightened amid Israel’s war against Hamas militants in Gaza.
Palestinians have held weekly protests in Beita since 2020 over the expansion of nearby Evyatar, a settler outpost. Ultra-nationalist members of Israel’s ruling coalition have acted to legalese previously unauthorized outposts like Evyatar, a move Washington says threatens the stability of the West Bank and undercuts efforts toward a two-state solution to the conflict.
Since the 1967 Middle East war, Israel has occupied the West Bank of the Jordan River, an area Palestinians want as the core of a future independent state.
Israel has built a thickening array of settlements there that most countries deem illegal. Israel disputes that assertion, citing historical and biblical ties to the territory.
Family of US activist shot dead by Israeli forces says Biden has not called | US news | The Guardian
