Funeral takes place for American-Turkish activist Israeli military shot in West Bank
By Zahid Mahmood and Rosa Rahimi, CNN
(CNN) — The American-Turkish activist Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, who was killed by Israeli gunfire in the West Bank last week, has been buried in her family’s hometown in southwestern Turkey.
The activist’s body arrived in Turkey on Friday in a flat top coffin, wrapped in the Turkish flag and carried by soldiers, in a ceremony that is usually reserved for fallen troops.
Her coffin was placed outside Didim Central Mosque on Saturday, where hundreds of people gathered to pay their respects to the 26-year-old. A smaller event later took place at a cemetery where an imam read verses from the Quran and mourners laid white flowers on her grave.
Eygi, who was born in Turkey and had joint US citizenship, was shot by Israeli forces while taking part in a weekly protest against an Israeli settlement near the Palestinian village of Beita. All Israeli settlements are considered illegal under international law.
She was a recent graduate of the University of Washington, and had been volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the same pro-Palestinian activist group as Rachel Corrie, a US citizen killed in 2003 while attempting to stop an Israeli bulldozer from demolishing Palestinian homes in Gaza.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it was “highly likely” that Eygi was “hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire.”
In its initial inquiry into the incident, the IDF said that the shot was not aimed at the activist, but at “the key instigator” of a “violent riot” at the Beita Junction where it said Palestinians burned tires and hurled rocks at Israeli security forces. It didn’t name the alleged instigator.
US President Joe Biden called the shooting “totally unacceptable” and said there should be “full accountability” over her death. But he has also called the shooting a “tragic error”.
The speaker of Turkey’s Grand National Assembly, Numan Kurtulmuş spoke outside of the mosque during the procession and said Eygi’s killing was “not the fault of a handful of Israeli soldiers, this is the crime of a terrorist state.”
Kurtulmuş indirectly referred to Biden, calling him “so far from humanity” for describing Eygi’s death as an apparent accident.
The ISM has criticized Biden for refusing Eygi’s family’s demands for an independent and transparent investigation into her death.
“Why aren’t we seeing justice?” one of her friends, Juliette Majid, told CNN.
“What are they, what are they doing? We just want to be able to have justice for our friend, for our loved one. We want justice for those she loved most, for her family.”
She was remembered by her family as “a fiercely passionate human rights activist” who was “gentle, brave, silly, supportive, and a ray of sunshine.”
“Like the olive tree she lay beneath where she took her last breaths, Aysenur was strong, beautiful, and nourishing. Her presence in our lives was taken needlessly, unlawfully, and violently by the Israeli military,” they said in a statement.
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