Aysenur Ezgi Eygi’s Family After Blinken Meeting: US Isn’t Holding Israel Accountable
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.........
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