The family of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi has said that they left a meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday with doubt that the U.S. will ever hold her killers accountable after the American pro-Palestinian activist was killed by Israeli forces in September.
In interviews with various news outlets, Eygi’s family has said that Blinken did not offer any hope for U.S. action on her death, despite President Joe Biden’s threat to foreign governments that “we will respond” if they harm an American.
“[Blinken] was very deferential to the Israelis,” Hamid Ali, Eygi’s husband, told BBC. “It felt like he was saying his hands were tied and they weren’t able to really do much.”
Per CNN, Ali says that during the meeting, Blinken “unfortunately repeated a lot of the same things we’ve been hearing for the past 20 years, particularly since Rachel Corrie’s killing,” referring to an American activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003 when protesting illegal home demolitions in Gaza.
Eygi’s family has repeatedly called for a U.S. investigation into her killing, but the U.S. has thus far declined to open a probe.
Eygi’s sister, Ozden Bennett, similarly said that the meeting did not inspire hope. Bennett said Blinken promised to “be in touch with the Israeli military and officials about changes in conduct,” adding, “which we know from Rachel Corrie’s case, Shireen Abu Akleh’s case, has not led to anything substantial or any kind of positive changes to prevent incidents like my sister’s killing from occurring again.”
Indeed, the U.S. deferred to Israel to investigate Corrie’s killing, for which Israel absolved itself, claiming that her death was an accident. When Israel killed Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh while she was covering an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank in 2022, the U.S. announced that it would launch an investigation — but, years later, has not released the results, and has deflected questions about it.
Further, the U.S. appears poised to absolve Israel of responsibility; last year, the State Department said that Abu Akleh’s killing was “unintentional,” despite numerous investigations finding that Israeli soldiers shot her intentionally. At the time, the U.S. made the same hollow promise to “press Israel” about changing its practices.
U.S. officials appear to be following the same playbook with the death of Eygi, who Israeli forces shot in the head while she was standing in an olive grove after a protest in the occupied West Bank. In September, just days after her death, President Joe Biden claimed her death was an “accident” — contradicting reports finding that Israeli forces were targeting activists and poking holes in Israel’s narrative of the killing.
At a vigil for Eygi on Monday night with her family, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) harshly criticized the Biden administration for its refusal to hold Israel accountable for killing the 26-year-old activist.
“We know that President Biden recently said, ‘if you harm an American, we will respond.’ But his inaction has made it clear once again that when it comes to the Israeli government murdering Americans, it’s a complete lie,” Tlaib said. “We all know that Aysenur’s murder was not a tragic error, as the president shamefully called it. It was devastating for her family to hear that. We know — and she knew — that what the Israeli military did to her, they do to Palestinians every single day.”
Activists in Palestine with ISM have said that they feel their lives are in danger with the State Department refusing to take action on Eygi’s death, and advocates have warned that Israel will continue to kill Americans under the current system of impunity. Turkey, where Eygi held dual citizenship, has opened its own independent probe of the killing.
In a heart-wrenching op-ed recently, Ali wrote of the grief he has experienced since losing Eygi — and the knowledge that the U.S. will never avenge her death.
“If the U.S. had held Israel accountable for the killing of other Americans like Rachel Corrie or Shireen Abu Akleh, perhaps Israeli soldiers would not feel so emboldened to kill Americans, and other civilians, today. Perhaps, instead of standing in this closet now alone and paralyzed with pain, I would be with Aysenur trying to pick out what we would wear to dinner,” Ali wrote.
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