Al Jazeera
Officials in the United States have said that Washington still does not ‘know with full certainty what transpired’ when a US citizen was killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank last week, stressing that they were waiting for the findings of an Israeli investigation.
The US on Monday also rejected calls for an independent investigation into the fatal shooting of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel declined to acknowledge that Eygi was killed by an Israeli soldier, but he called for the process to ‘play out and for the facts to be gathered’.
He also urged Israel to ‘quickly and robustly conduct’ its probe and make the findings public, but confirmed the administration is not planning to independently investigate the killing.
‘We are working closely to ascertain the facts, but there is not a State Department-led investigation that is going on,’ Patel said at a press briefing on Monday.
Eygi, 26, was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper on Friday while attending a demonstration against the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in Beita, south of Nablus. Israeli forces fired live ammunition, stun grenades and tear gas at demonstrators, with eyewitnesses saying Eygi was intentionally targeted even as she posed no threat.
Palestinian rights advocates and Eygi’s loved ones have been calling for accountability for her killing.
Earlier this month, following the killing in Gaza of US-Israeli captive Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the US Department of Justice quickly announced it was investigating his killing ‘and each and every one of Hamas’s brutal murders of Americans’.
Pressed on the double standard on Monday, Patel sought to differentiate between Goldberg-Polin’s killing and the murder of Eygi.
‘Let’s make sure we are not conflating the killing of American-Israeli citizens being held by a terrorist group,’ he told reporters.
‘Each circumstance is unique and different,’ he added.
The department did not immediately answer a request by Al Jazeera to elaborate 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 investigation process handled by the very perpetrators of these murders.
No US investigation
After the White House said on Friday that it was ‘deeply disturbed’ by the killing and that it had requested Israel to conduct an investigation, Eygi’s family pushed back and called for an independent one. ‘We welcome the White House’s statement of condolences, but given the circumstances of Aysenur’s killing, an Israeli investigation is not adequate,’ they said in a statement.
A spokesperson for the White House said on Monday that US President Joe Biden had not yet spoken to the family.
Ahmad Abuznaid, the executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USPCR), dismissed the US call for Israel to investigate its own forces. Israeli authorities rarely ever prosecute troops for abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories despite reports of rampant rights violations against Palestinians.
‘The first investigation should be into how the State Department continues to arm the state of Israel as it’s killed several US citizens and tens of thousands of Palestinians in the last year alone. That’s the primary investigation we’re waiting on the results for,’ Abuznaid told Al Jazeera.
Margaret DeReus, executive director of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, also described the US call for an Israeli investigation as ‘wholly insufficient’.
‘Israel doesn’t conduct transparent investigations and neither Israel nor the US hold the perpetrators of these killings accountable. You don’t rely on the criminal to investigate his own crime,’ DeReus told Al Jazeera.
‘Over the past nearly 11 months, President Biden has shown daily which lives he values and which lives he deems dispensable. He cannot place his allegiance to this genocidal regime over the lives of his own citizens,’ she added.
‘Cover-ups’
Israeli forces have killed several US 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 rejected demands for a US-led probe into the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by the Israeli military in the West Bank, urging Israel to conduct its own probe instead.
Israeli authorities eventually dismissed the fatal shooting as an ‘accident’ and refused to pursue criminal charges in the case.
Israeli and US media outlets reported months after the killing of Abu Akleh that the US Justice Department opened a probe into the shooting. But US officials have not publicly confirmed the existence of the investigation, whose findings remain unknown.
Families of the victims have condemned the decision to once again allow Israel to investigate a killing by its own forces.
‘Israel does not do investigations; they do cover-ups,’ 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, US-led probe — to no avail.
‘Our family worked for an investigation into Rachel’s killing, and we wanted some consequences out of that. 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 again,’ Cindy Corrie said.
Some advocates have argued that even a US-led investigation would not suffice. ‘An international investigation, ideally by the ICC, must commence because Israeli authorities cannot be trusted to credibly investigate the killings of American citizens, and the US government is unwilling to hold Israel accountable,’ human rights lawyer Jamil Dakwar, who co-represented the Corrie family in their civil case in Israeli courts, told Al Jazeera.
Eygi, who was born in Antalya, Turkey but grew up in Seattle, Washington in the US, 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 organisation.
In recent years, Beita has been the site of weekly demonstrations against the construction of new illegal Israeli outposts. Before Eygi, 17 Palestinian protesters were killed there since 2020, according to the group.