By Liam Stack and Ephrat Livni
The family of an American woman killed at a protest in the occupied West Bank demanded an independent investigation Saturday, saying that Israel could not investigate her death impartially because witnesses and Palestinian officials accused Israeli soldiers of killing her.
The woman, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, was shot in the head Friday in Beita, a village in the West Bank, during a protest against an Israeli settler outpost. In a statement, her family said “given the circumstances of Aysenur’s killing, an Israeli investigation is not adequate.”
“We call on President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Secretary of State Blinken to order an independent investigation into the unlawful killing of a U.S. citizen and to ensure full accountability for the guilty parties,” said the statement, which was posted to Instagram by a friend, Juliette Majid.
Eygi’s death carried overtones of a prominent incident in 2003, when a 23-year-old activist named Rachel Corrie was crushed by an Israeli armored bulldozer during a protest in the Gaza Strip. Like Eygi, Corrie was a resident of Washington state, and both were associated with the International Solidarity Movement, a nonviolent group resisting the Israeli occupation.
Eygi’s family described her as “a fiercely passionate human rights activist” who “felt a deep responsibility to serve others and lived a life of caring for those in need with action.”
On Friday, friends of Eygi said she would have wanted the world to recognize that shootings like the one that killed her are not uncommon in the occupied Palestinian territories. According to the United Nations, Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 600 people in the West Bank since the war in Gaza began last year.
“She was active on campus in student-led protests, advocating human dignity, and calling for an end to the violence against the people of Palestine,” the statement said. “Aysenur felt compelled to travel to the West Bank to stand in solidarity with Palestinian civilians who continue to endure ongoing repression and violence.”
Friends said Eygi’s activism began in her teenage years, when she protested the construction of an oil pipeline through the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota.
After the war in Gaza began, she helped organize protests on campus at the University of Washington, where earlier this year she earned a degree in psychology, with a minor in Middle Eastern languages and cultures.
“Aysenur was so energetic, and incredibly passionate about justice,” said Majid, the friend who posted the family statement. “Her loss is felt profoundly.”
She said Eygi was an experienced activist who was not naive about the danger of joining protests in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. “I think she knew the risks going in,” Majid said.
Eygi was born in Turkey but raised in the Seattle area. An uncle, Cemal Birden, said her family moved from Antalya, on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, to the United States when she was less than a year old.
Birden said he told Eygi that traveling to Jerusalem and the West Bank could be dangerous. “My niece was such a pure, such a good kid,” he said in a telephone interview.
Frequent protests have occurred in Beita, a village near Nablus, since 2021, when Israeli settlers seized land on a nearby hilltop that Palestinian villagers said had long belonged to them.
Several protesters have been killed, and scores more injured, since the creation of the hilltop outpost, now known as Evyatar. The Israeli government said recently that it would legalize the outpost.
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