US officials said Washington still does not know with complete certainty what happened when an American citizen was killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank last week, stressing that they are awaiting the results of an Israeli investigation.
On Monday, the United States also appeared to reject calls for an independent investigation into the death of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi. State Department spokesman Vedant Patel refused to acknowledge that Eygi had been killed by an Israeli soldier, but called for the process to be “completed and the facts gathered.”
He also urged Israel to “conduct its investigation swiftly and vigorously” and make the findings public, but confirmed that the administration has no plans to independently investigate the killing – as requested by Eygi’s family.
“We are working closely to establish the facts, but there is no ongoing investigation by the State Department,” Patel said at a press briefing Monday.
Eygi, 26, was shot and wounded by an Israeli sniper on Friday while participating in a protest against the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in Beita, south of Nablus. Israeli forces fired live ammunition, stun grenades and tear gas at the protesters. Witnesses said Eygi was intentionally targeted even though she posed no threat.
Palestinian rights activists and Eygi’s relatives are calling for accountability for his killing.
Earlier this month, following the killing in Gaza of American-Israeli prisoner Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the US Justice Department quickly announced that it was investigating his assassination “and every brutal murder of Americans committed by Hamas.”
Pressed to apply double standards on Monday, Patel sought to differentiate the Goldberg-Polin killing from the Eygi shooting.
“Let’s make sure that we don’t confuse the direct killing of American-Israeli citizens who are being held hostage with the killing of a terrorist group,” he told reporters.
“Every circumstance is unique and different,” he added.
The department did not immediately respond to a request from Tel Aviv Tribune to expand on that comment.
Patel also did not directly answer questions about how Eygi’s family and those of others killed by Israel could trust an investigative process led by the perpetrators of their murders.
No WE investigation
After the White House said Friday that it was “deeply troubled” by the killing and had asked Israel to conduct an investigation, Eygi’s family responded and called for an independent probe. “We welcome the White House’s statement of condolence, but given the circumstances of Aysenur’s murder, an Israeli investigation is not adequate,” they said in a statement.
A White House spokesperson said Monday that U.S. President Joe Biden had not yet spoken to the family.
Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USPCR), rejected the US call for Israel to investigate its own forces. Israeli authorities rarely prosecute soldiers for abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories, despite reports of widespread violations of Palestinian rights.
“The first investigation should be into how the State Department continues to arm the State of Israel, which has killed several American citizens and tens of thousands of Palestinians in the last year alone. That is the main investigation that we are awaiting the results of,” Abuznaid told Tel Aviv Tribune.
Margaret DeReus, executive director of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, also called the US call for an Israeli investigation “totally inadequate.”
“Israel does not conduct transparent investigations and neither Israel nor the United States holds the perpetrators of these murders accountable for their actions. The criminal cannot be relied upon to investigate his crime,” DeReus told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“Over the past 11 months, President Biden has shown every day which lives he values and which lives he deems expendable. He cannot put his allegiance to this genocidal regime ahead of the lives of his own citizens,” she added.
“Cover-ups”
Israeli forces have killed several American citizens in recent years, but the Biden administration has consistently rejected calls for independent investigations into those incidents as well.
For example, in 2022, Washington resisted calls for a US-led investigation into the killing of Tel Aviv Tribune journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by the Israeli military in the West Bank, urging Israel to conduct its own investigation.
Israeli authorities ultimately dismissed the fatal shooting as an “accident” and declined to file criminal charges in the case.
Israeli and American media reported several months after Abu Akleh’s death that the U.S. Justice Department had opened an investigation into the shooting. But U.S. authorities have not publicly confirmed the existence of the investigation, and its findings remain unknown.
The victims’ families condemned the decision to once again allow Israel to investigate a killing committed by its own forces.
“Israel doesn’t investigate, it covers up,” Cindy Corrie, Rachel Corrie’s mother, told Democracy Now on Monday. An Israeli soldier crushed Rachel Corrie to death with a bulldozer in Rafah in 2003. Her family spent years lobbying multiple administrations to launch an independent, U.S.-led investigation, to no avail.
“Our family worked to have Rachel’s murder investigated and we wanted to see consequences. And we hoped – even though we didn’t know the names of the people who would be killed in the future – that it would stop and that it wouldn’t happen,” Cindy Corrie said.
Some human rights advocates say even a US-led investigation would not be enough. “An international investigation, ideally by the ICC, must be launched because Israeli authorities cannot be trusted to credibly investigate the killings of US citizens, and the US government is unwilling to hold Israel to account,” Jamil Dakwar, a human rights lawyer who co-represents the Corrie family in their civil lawsuit in Israeli courts, told Tel Aviv Tribune.
Eygi, born in Antalya, Turkey, but raised in Seattle, Washington, USA, had recently graduated from the University of Washington, where she had participated in campus protests against US support for Israel’s war on Gaza. She was a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a pro-Palestinian organization.
In recent years, Beita has been the scene of weekly protests against the construction of new illegal Israeli outposts. Before Eygi, 17 Palestinian protesters have been killed there since 2020, according to the organization.
