The loved ones of an American activist who was killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank last week have condemned the military’s claim on Tuesday that a sniper “unintentionally” shot the 26-year-old woman, saying they are “deeply offended” at such a suggestion and still want an independent probe of the incident.
The statements both from Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi’s volunteer group and her family in the U.S. came in response to the Israeli military’s preliminary investigation into itself, the results of which were released Tuesday. Israel launched the probe after eyewitness testimony, the United Nations and Turkish and Palestinian officials all said that an Israeli soldier shot the woman in the head on Friday following a weekly protest against illegal Israeli settlement expansions in Beita, a Palestinian village near the West Bank city of Nablus.
The Israeli military said that its preliminary inquiry found it is “highly likely” that Eygi was shot “indirectly and unintentionally” by Israeli fire “which was not aimed at her, but aimed at the key instigator of the riot.” The military also said it “expresses its deepest regret” for killing Eygi and “sent a request to carry out an autopsy,” adding it has launched a criminal investigation.
Eygi’s family said that the result of Israel’s initial probe is “wholly inadequate” and that the activist’s killing while seeking shelter from Israeli violence “cannot be misconstrued as anything except a deliberate, targeted and precise attack by the military against an unarmed civilian.”
“We are deeply offended by the suggestion that her killing by a trained sniper was in any way unintentional,” the family said in their statement. “The disregard shown for human life in the inquiry is appalling.”
Eygi was from Seattle, where as a graduate student she helped organize the campus protest movement at the University of Washington during the nationwide wave of demonstrations against Israel’s offensive in Gaza. Photos circulating after she was killed show her in a graduation gown while wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh.
She was participating in the West Bank demonstration as a volunteer with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a human rights group that on Tuesday joined Eygi’s family in rejecting the Israeli military’s claim that the killing was unintentional.
“The military’s account of the events is blindly based on the accomplices’ version, which completely contradicts the testimonies of multiple eyewitnesses, whom the military did not even contact,” ISM said in a statement. “All eyewitnesses said immediately following the killing that the scene where Ayşenur was killed was completely quiet and that there could have been no excuse to open fire, let alone directly hitting a woman peacefully standing in an olive grove.”
The Palestinian Authority held a funeral Friday in Beita for Eygi, who also held Turkish citizenship. Turkish officials said they are working to repatriate her body so that she can be buried on the Aegean coast, according to her family’s wishes.
“As we mourn the death of our beloved Ayşenur,