Officials: US not investigating killing of its citizen Aysenur Eygi in the West Bank | News on the Israel-Palestine conflict

Officials in the United States said Washington still “does not know with complete certainty what happened” when a US citizen was killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank last week, and said they were awaiting the results of an Israeli investigation.

The US also appeared to reject calls on Monday for an independent investigation into the fatal shooting of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi. State Department spokesman Vedant Patel would not acknowledge that Eygi was killed by an Israeli soldier, but called for the process to be “completed and the facts to be gathered.”

He also called on Israel to conduct its investigation “swiftly and vigorously” and publish the results, but confirmed that the government does not plan to conduct an independent investigation into the murder – as Eygi's family had demanded.

“We are working closely to establish the facts, but there is currently no State Department-led investigation,” Patel said at a press conference on Monday.

Eygi, 26, was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper on Friday as she took part in a demonstration against the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in Beita, south of Nablus. Israeli forces fired live ammunition, stun grenades and tear gas at the protesters. Witnesses said Eygi was deliberately targeted, even though she posed no threat.

Palestinian human rights activists and Eygi's relatives are demanding that the perpetrators be held accountable for her killing.

Earlier this month, following the killing of American-Israeli prisoner Hersh Goldberg-Polin in Gaza, the US Department of Justice quickly announced that it was investigating his killing “and every single brutal murder of Americans by Hamas.”

When asked about the double standards on Monday, Patel tried to distinguish between the murder of Goldberg-Polin and the shooting of Eygi.

“We must make sure that we do not confuse the direct assassination of American-Israeli citizens with the taking of hostages by a terrorist group,” he told reporters.

“Every situation is unique and different,” he added.

The ministry did not immediately respond to Al Jazeera's request to elaborate on this comment.

Patel also did not directly answer questions about how Eygi's family and the families of other people killed by Israel could trust an investigation conducted by the perpetrators of their murders.

NO US Investigation

After the White House said on Friday it was “deeply troubled” by the killing and had asked Israel to investigate, Eygi's family pushed back and demanded an independent investigation. “We welcome the White House's expression of condolences, but given the circumstances of Aysenur's killing, an Israeli investigation is not appropriate,” it said in a statement.

A White House spokesman said on Monday that US President Joe Biden had not yet spoken to the family.

Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USPCR), rejected US calls for Israel to investigate its own forces. Israeli authorities rarely prosecute soldiers for abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories, despite reports of rampant human rights abuses against Palestinians.

“The first investigation should look at how the State Department continues to arm the State of Israel, even as it has killed several US citizens and tens of thousands of Palestinians in the last year alone. That is the main investigation, the results of which we are awaiting,” Abuznaid told Al Jazeera.

Margaret DeReus, executive director of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, also described the US call for an Israeli investigation as “totally inadequate”.

“Israel does not conduct transparent investigations and neither Israel nor the United States holds the perpetrators of these murders accountable. You do not rely on the criminal to investigate his crime,” DeReus told Al Jazeera.

“President Biden has demonstrated every day for the past nearly 11 months which lives he values ​​and which he considers expendable. He cannot put his loyalty to this genocidal regime above the lives of his own citizens,” she added.

“Cover-ups”

Israeli forces have killed several US citizens in recent years, but the Biden administration has consistently rejected calls for independent investigations into these incidents.

For example, in 2022, Washington resisted calls for a US-led investigation into the Israeli military's killing of Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank, instead calling on Israel to conduct its own investigation.

Israeli authorities ultimately dismissed the fatal shooting as an “accident” and declined to press charges in the case.

Months after Abu Akleh's killing, Israeli and American media reported that the U.S. Department of Justice had launched an investigation into the shooting. But U.S. authorities have not publicly confirmed the existence of the investigation, and its results remain unknown.

The families of the victims condemned the decision to allow Israel to reopen an investigation into a killing committed by its own forces.

“Israel is not conducting investigations, but cover-ups,” Rachel Corrie's mother Cindy Corrie told Democracy Now on Monday. An Israeli soldier crushed Rachel Corrie to death with a bulldozer in Rafah in 2003. Her family spent years lobbying several governments for an independent, US-led investigation – to no avail.

“Our family was committed to an investigation into Rachel's murder and we wanted consequences to follow. And we hoped – even though we didn't know the names of the people who would be killed in the future – that this would stop and not happen,” said Cindy Corrie.

Some advocates argue that even a US-led investigation would not be enough. “An international investigation, ideally by the ICC, must be launched because the Israeli authorities cannot be trusted to credibly investigate the killings of American citizens and the US government is unwilling to hold Israel accountable,” human rights lawyer Jamil Dakwar, who co-represented the Corrie family in their civil case in Israeli courts, told Al Jazeera.

Eygi, who was born in Antalya, Turkey, but grew up in Seattle, Washington, in the United States, had just graduated from the University of Washington, where she had participated in campus protests against U.S. support for Israel's war on Gaza. She was a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a pro-Palestinian organization.

In recent years, Beita has been the scene of weekly demonstrations against the construction of new illegal Israeli outposts. Before Eygi, 17 Palestinian protesters have been killed there since 2020, according to the group.