'So many similarities' West Bank killing recalls death in 2003

When Cindy and Craig Corrie heard about the death of Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, the American-Turkish woman killed at a protest in the occupied West Bank last Friday, it reopened a 21-yearold wound. "You feel the ripping apart again of your own family when you know that's happening to another family," Craig said.

- Andrew Roth

In 2003, their daughter Rachel was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer during a protest in Rafah against the demolitions of homes in Gaza. The couple have joined a chorus of human rights advocates calling for an independent investigation into Eygi's death, saying they feared her case would go unpunished like their daughter's.

"It's very personal," said Craig, whose daughter - like Eygi - was an idealistic, politically engaged university graduate from Washington state and a member of the International Solidarity Movement, a pro-Palestine organisation. "There's so many similarities."

The couple have lobbied for decades for justice in Rachel's case, in which the Israeli military exonerated itself and the US failed to launch an investigation. In 2015, the Israeli supreme court ruled against the Corries in a lawsuit that sought to hold Israel liable.

Ticking off the names of activists and journalists who have died in Gaza and the West Bank since the early 2000s, the couple said each unpunished killing made the next one more likely.

"If you talk about things changing, I think they're changing for the worse," said Craig. "In our family, our motive for doing the work we've done... was to try to keep this from happening to another person and [we see] the failure of that to happen." The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Tuesday that an initial inquiry into Eygi's death had concluded it was "highly likely" that she was "hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire", indicating that the Israeli government accepted that its soldiers had killed her but would be unlikely to prosecute anyone.