WASHINGTON — US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met on Monday with the family of Aysenur Eygi, a Turkish-American activist shot dead by the IDF in the West Bank earlier this year, the State Department announced.
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters that Blinken expressed condolences to the family and reiterated his belief that the September 6 incident should never have happened.
Eygi, a 26-year-old American originally from Turkey, was an activist with the International Solidarity Movement when she was killed in the village of Beita while taking part in a protest march against Jewish settlement expansion.
Miller said Blinken informed her family that Israel has told the US in recent days that the IDF is finalizing its investigation into Eygi’s killing, and that the State Department will keep the family in the loop on the matter.
Asked whether he would back the Eygi family’s call for an independent investigation into her killing, Miller said it was a matter for the Justice Department to decide.
Eygi’s husband Hamad Ali told reporters after the meeting with Blinken that the secretary was “attentive,” but gave no assurances that Washington would carry out its own investigation and instead urged her relatives to wait for Israel to finish its inquiry.
“He was very deferential to the Israelis,” Ali said. “It felt like he was saying his hands were tied and they weren’t able to really do much.”
Ali also said that Blinken “repeated a lot of the same things we’ve been hearing for the past 20 years, particularly since Rachel Corrie’s killing.”
Corrie, a 23-year-old International Solidarity Movement activist, was killed in Gaza in 2003 while attempting to block an Israeli army bulldozer that was engaged in a home demolition operation. An IDF investigation later found the driver did not intentionally run over her and the Supreme Court upheld a ruling exempting Israel from paying damaged as the incident happened in a war zone.
Israel acknowledged that its troops fatally shot Eygi shortly after she was killed, but said it was an unintentional act that occured during a demonstration that turned into a “violent riot,” and that she in all probability was mistakenly hit by soldiers aiming at another individual.
Israel’s initial findings on the killing of Eygi did not exonerate Israeli security forces, Miller stated in September, warning that Washington would consider other measures if not satisfied with the results of the full Israeli probe.
A Washington Post report later disputed the IDF’s version of events, saying that Eygi was shot over half an hour after the most intense point of the demonstration and some 20 minutes after the protesters had moved down the road, meaning she was approximately 180 meters (200 yards) away from the troops when she was killed and could not have posed a threat.
After she was killed, her family said that “her presence in our lives was taken needlessly, unlawfully, and violently by the Israeli military,” and that “a US citizen, Aysenur was peacefully standing for justice when she was killed.”
“We call on President [Joe] Biden, Vice President [Kamala] Harris, and Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken to order an independent investigation into the unlawful killing of a US citizen and to ensure full accountability for the guilty parties,” the family said.
A few weeks after Eygi’s death, Blinken described her killing as “unprovoked and unjustified” and demanded an overhaul of Israeli military conduct in the West Bank.
Violence in the West Bank has surged in the past year, following the October 7 Hamas terror onslaught in southern Israel, in which some 1,200 people were massacred and 251 were taken hostage.
Since that date, Israeli troops have arrested some 5,250 wanted Palestinians across the West Bank, including more than 2,050 affiliated with Hamas.
According to the Palestinian Authority health ministry, more than 716 West Bank Palestinians have been killed in that time. The IDF says the vast majority of them were gunmen killed in exchanges of fire, rioters who clashed with troops or terrorists carrying out attacks.
During the same period, 42 people, including Israeli security personnel, have been killed in terror attacks in Israel and the West Bank. Another six members of the security forces were killed in clashes with terror operatives in the West Bank.