SHE had come to the West Bank village of Beita to bear peaceful witness and lend protection to the Palestinian community under constant attack there from illegal Israeli settlers.

As a Friday prayer ceremony ended and a skirmish broke out between Palestinian youths and the Israeli military, she and other observers retreated beyond the village to an olive grove. It was supposed to be a safe place.

Calm reigned for 30 minutes. Then two shots rang out, fired from a distance of 230 yards, hitting her in the head. She was Aysenur Egan Eygi, a 26-year-old US citizen. She died on the way to hospital. No-one from the Biden administration has since called her family or offered them condolences.

Rob Sadler, a British activist who was with the group that went to Beita that day and who retreated with Eygi to the olive grove, told Turkish television as emotion choked his voice that it appeared to be “a surgical and targeted shot directly into the grove.”

The Israeli military, Sadler said, “Don’t want international volunteers to expose to the international media and our own governments and communities their campaign of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, which of course goes hand in glove with their genocidal campaign perpetrated in Gaza.”

Eygi had just arrived from the US with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a group that uses non-violent direct action to resist the oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian population, according to the organisation’s website. Born in Turkey, Eygi grew up in the US and had just graduated from the University of Washington.

In the days after her killing, the Biden administration embarked on its latest round of excuses and apologies for the Israeli government. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a press conference on the day Eygi died that the administration, while “deeply disturbed,” would demand “more information and request an investigation into the incident,” effectively asking the perpetrators to investigate their own crime.

At a second State Department press conference on September 9, spokesperson Vedant Patel was confronted directly by the wealth of eyewitness evidence suggesting Eygi had been deliberately targeted.

“There are actual eyewitnesses that saw exactly what happened, so do you suspect there is some entity or some other person that had fired the shot other than an Israeli soldier?” asked Said Arikat, the Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem-based Palestinian-Arabic daily newspaper Al-Quds.

“You can ask the same questions as many times as you’d like. That’s not going to change my answer,” Patel said. “Important work is being done to ascertain what exactly happened and we are going to let that process play out.”

Five days after Eygi’s killing, when Israel finally admitted it was “highly likely” their forces were responsible, President Joe Biden still bought into the Israeli propaganda, excusing Eygi’s “totally unacceptable” death as “a tragic error resulting from an unnecessary escalation.” A “tragic error” at 230 yards.

Blinken then delivered another toothless admonition, suggesting that Israel has to do better. “It’s not acceptable. It has to change. And we’ll be making that clear to the senior-most members of the Israeli government,” he said. Except that no-one there is listening, as evidenced by a genocide that has continued for almost a year.

The limp White House response to Eygi’s murder stands in stark contrast to the official outrage expressed after the discovery of the six Israeli hostages executed by Hamas, including US citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin.

US Vice-President and Democratic presidential contender, Kamala Harris, blasted Hamas as an “evil terrorist organisation” whose “depravity is evident and horrifying.” She has used no such rhetoric toward the IDF which has slaughtered more than 40,000 people, mostly women and children.

Eygi’s family, while maintaining their privacy during a time of intense grief, put out an initial statement in which they said: “Given the circumstances of Aysenur’s killing, an Israeli investigation is not adequate.”

In a further tribute, they wrote: “Like the olive trees 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.”

But as the days passed and the White House continued to excuse Israel for her killing, Eygi’s family spoke out more forcefully. On the same day as Biden’s apologia, they wrote: “The appropriate action is for President Biden and Vice-President Harris to speak with the family directly, and order an independent, transparent investigation into the killing of Aysenur, a volunteer for peace.”

In the meantime, the Washington Post did its own in-depth investigation, published on September 12, reviewing footage taken by eyewitnesses and interviewing others, all of which backed the version that Eygi was an innocent bystander far from the action.

Eygi’s death resonated with the parents of Rachel Corrie, like Eygi also an ISM volunteer and who was killed at 23 when Israeli forces ran over her with a bulldozer during a 2003 protest in Rafah.

“Aysenur and her family deserve better than White House and Department of State platitudes and calls for Israeli investigations that never result in truth, action, or enforcement of US law,” said Cindy and Craig Corrie in a statement on the ISM website. “We are demanding more. The time for accountability is now.”

However, that accountability rests not only on the shoulders of Israel, alleges Sadler. “Ayse’s blood and the blood of those other martyrs is just as much on the hands of the US government and the British government and everybody else who supports the Israeli government as it is on the soldier who murdered her,” he said.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.