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Rachel Corrie's Parents Urge Probe Into Israel's Killing of American Activist Ayşenur Eygi
"There needs to be consequences," said Craig Corrie. "These are American weapons that are being used. That's against U.S. law, and it should be stopped."
Sep 11, 2024
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, toldThe 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."
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DOJ Urged to Provide Update on Probe of Shireen Abu Akleh's Killing
DAWN's leader slammed the department's "apparent failure to make progress on this investigation, which has fueled Israeli impunity, leading to the systematic and widespread killings of Palestinian journalists."
Jul 29, 2024
An advocacy group founded by an assassinated journalist demanded answers from the U.S. Department of Justice on Monday regarding its investigation of Israeli troops killing American Palestinian reporter Shireen Abu Akleh on May 11, 2022.
"Perhaps the DOJ thinks we will forget about the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh as well as the investigation it promised the American people two years ago, but we have not," said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), in a statement.
"The DOJ should take responsibility for its apparent failure to make progress on this investigation, which has fueled Israeli impunity, leading to the systematic and widespread killings of Palestinian journalists, at least 108 since Abu-Akleh's 2022 killing."
"Without an interim update on the investigation or a concluding report, it is hard to take seriously U.S. claims that it will vigorously investigate and hold accountable extrajudicial killings of American citizens."
Abu Akleh was fatally shot in the head by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) while covering a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the illegally occupied West Bank, according to firsthand accounts and various investigations that have been made public. The 51-year-old Al Jazeera journalist was wearing a blue press vest and helmet.
"A beloved and prominent figure in the region, Abu Akleh's killing not only led to prolonged unrest in the West Bank but also became emblematic of Israel's use of lethal force to intimidate and kill journalists," DAWN leaders wrote to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray.
As the letter—signed by Whitson and Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, DAWN's director of research for Israel-Palestine—detailed:
Since the launch of the DOJ investigation, you have not made any information available regarding the nature, scope, and timeline of the probe into the killing of an American citizen by a foreign army, despite prior comments by then State Department spokesperson Ned Price that "those responsible for Shireen's killing should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law." Regrettably, more recent statements coming from U.S. authorities imply that the administration has pushed the investigation to the wayside. At a news briefing on World Press Freedom Day, a State Department spokesperson insisted that Shireen's murder was "unintentional" despite credible reports to the contrary and noted that the U.S. had no further updates on the case.
Some critics have connected Abu Akleh's killing to what the Committee to Protect Journalists last year called a "deadly, decadeslong pattern" by the IDF—which, has slaughtered over 100 journalists and tens of thousands of other Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in Israeli forces' ongoing retaliation for a Hamas-led attack on Israel last October.
"The impunity that Israel has enjoyed for its attacks on the press, including for the murder of Abu Akleh, has made Israeli officials confident that they can kill as many Palestinian journalists as they want with no accountability," DAWN leadership wrote to the DOJ. "Israel's failure to identify the perpetrators, open a criminal investigation, and to cooperate with external investigations further compounds Israel's impunity in targeting journalists in the region."
The letter calls for the DOJ to provide a "timely response" to a series of questions about the department's investigatory steps, Israeli cooperation or lack thereof, and which specific U.S. criminal laws are being considered for the probe.
Schaeffer Omer-Man said that "without an interim update on the investigation or a concluding report, it is hard to take seriously U.S. claims that it will vigorously investigate and hold accountable extrajudicial killings of American citizens."
"The lack of communicable progress also adds to the grief felt by the Abu Akleh family, who filed a formal complaint with the ICC in May 2022 about Abu Akleh's killing by IDF forces," he added, referring to the International Criminal Court.
DAWN was founded by the late Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and U.S. resident who—according to multiple investigations—was murdered at his home country's consulate in Istanbul, Turkey on October 2, 2018. As Common Dreamsreported on the fifth anniversary of his assassination last year, human rights advocates continue to condemn the failure of international officials to hold accountable the people responsible for his death.
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Palestinian Journalists Urge US Media to Boycott White House Correspondents' Dinner
"The Biden administration's ongoing support for Israel's genocidal policies implicates it directly in the relentless targeting and massacring of journalists in Gaza, including hundreds of our colleagues and their families."
Apr 05, 2024
Palestinian journalists this week issued an appeal to their U.S. counterparts urging them to boycott the April 27 White House Correspondents' Association dinner over the Biden administration's complicity in Israel's genocide in Gaza.
"In the past six months alone, the Israeli military has executed over 125 Palestinian journalists in Gaza—10% of Gaza's community of journalists," notes the appeal, which is being organized with the help of Adalah Justice Project and the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. "The year 2023 marked the bloodiest year for journalists worldwide in over a decade, with over 75% of killed journalists targeted by Israel’s attacks on Gaza."
"As Palestinian journalists, we urgently appeal to you, our colleagues globally, with a demand for immediate and unwavering action against the Biden administration's ongoing complicity in the systematic slaughter and persecution of journalists in Gaza," the authors wrote.
"We bear the enormous burden of exposing the realities of Israel's genocidal campaign to the world while living through it in real-time. Israel has killed more than 32,000 Palestinians as we watch on," the journalists said. The death toll in Gaza now exceeds 33,000—mostly women and children—with at least 75,550 other Palestinians wounded since October 7.
The appeal continues:
In Gaza, journalism is synonymous with putting our lives on the line as Israel methodically targets us in its desperate bid to silence our voices and obscure the grim reality of its genocidal actions and its project of ethnic cleansing in Palestine. For Palestinian journalists in Gaza, the blue press vest does not offer us protection, but rather functions as a red target.
The Biden administration's ongoing support for Israel's genocidal policies implicates it directly in the relentless targeting and massacring of journalists in Gaza, including hundreds of our colleagues and their families.
"Western media has played an integral role in manufacturing consent for Israel's ongoing violence against the Palestinian people, while obfuscating U.S. complicity," the journalists continued. "Over the past six months, the mainstream press has become the mouthpiece of the homicidal Israeli regime, promoting dehumanizing anti-Palestinian propaganda and platforming genocide apologists and perpetrators, while simultaneously ignoring, downplaying, and underreporting Israel's war crimes against Palestinians."
"The White House Correspondents' dinner is an embodiment of media manipulation, trading journalistic ethics for access," the appeal argues. "For journalists to fraternize at an event with President [Joe] Biden and Vice President [Kamala] Harris would be to normalize, sanitize, and whitewash the administration's role in genocide."
"As journalists reporting from the belly of the beast, you have a unique responsibility to speak truth to power and uphold journalistic integrity," the Palestinians implored U.S. journalists. "It is unacceptable to stay silent out of fear or professional concern while journalists in Gaza continue to be detained, tortured, and killed for doing our jobs."
The appeal's authors noted that American media professionals have demanded justice for journalists like Palestinian American Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh—who numerous probes found was intentionally killed by Israeli forces in 2022—and Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Washington Post columnist gruesomely murdered in 2018 by Saudi Arabian operatives in Turkey.
"It is past time journalists take action for journalists in Gaza," the Palestinians asserted. "We call on all journalists of conscience to stand with us and uplift our call to boycott the White House Correspondents' dinner."
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