US won't investigate killing of American-Turkish activist in West Bank, officials say

Officials in the United States have said that Washington still does not “know with full certainty what transpired” when a US citizen was killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank last week, stressing that they were waiting for the findings of an Israeli investigation.

The US on Monday also appeared to reject calls for an independent investigation into the fatal shooting of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel declined to acknowledge that Eygi was killed by an Israeli soldier, but he called for the process to “play out and for the facts to be gathered”.

He also urged Israel to “quickly and robustly conduct” its probe and make the findings public but confirmed the administration is not planning to independently investigate the killing — as Eygi’s family requested.

“We are working closely to ascertain the facts, but there is not a State Department-led investigation that is going on,” Patel said at a press briefing on Monday.

Eygi, 26, was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper on Friday while attending 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 demonstrators, with eyewitnesses saying Eygi was intentionally targeted even as she posed no threat.

Palestinian rights advocates and Eygi’s loved ones have been calling for accountability for her killing.

Earlier this month, following the killing in Gaza of US-Israeli captive Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the US Department of Justice quickly announced it was investigating his killing “and each and every one of Hamas’s brutal murders of Americans”.

Pressed on the double standard on Monday, Patel sought to differentiate Goldberg-Polin’s killing from the shooting of Eygi.

“Let’s make sure we are not conflating the direct murder of American-Israeli citizens, hostages, being held by a terrorist group,” he told reporters.

“Each circumstance is unique and different,” he added.

The department did not immediately answer a request by Al Jazeera to elaborate on that comment.

Patel also did not directly answer questions about how Eygi’s family and those of others killed by Israel could trust an investigation process handled by the perpetrators of their killings.

News.Az