What do you do with the clothes your wife was wearing when she was killed, now stained with her blood? How do you preserve them as evidence for an investigation that may never happen? What else can you do when your government has given no indication that it will hold her killer — a soldier in the army of a close ally — accountable, despite three months of daily efforts to get basic answers?
My wife, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, was shot in the head and killed by an Israeli soldier on Sept. 6, 2024, while peacefully standing under an olive tree in the occupied West Bank. Although the Biden administration has described her death as unprovoked and unjustified, it has yet to apply adequate pressure on Israel to seek justice for the killing of one of its citizens.
I will likely leave my wife’s bloody clothes in the box in which they came, deciding instead to keep our closet untarnished and full of warm memories. It is full of the outfits she wore during long hours spent with friends, on walks with her father, and visits with her niece, nephew, sister and brother-in-law. I can mentally piece together the outfits she wore on our wedding day, on our first date, and when I first saw her.
I was 26 when we met — the same age she was when she was killed. I stared at her in awe on our second date as she recalled her recent trip to Southeast Asia where she spent most of her time volunteering at a refugee relief village in Myanmar. The more I came to know her, I learned that her commitment to justice had been lifelong, leading her to help organize a Seattle high school student walkout after the 2016 election, to the Standing Rock protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline, to the negotiating table at the University of Washington during the student protests against Israel’s devastating war in Gaza, and finally to the West Bank to bear witness to the injustices experienced by Palestinians living under Israel’s brutal military rule.
As I stand in our closet, I see the T-shirt I was wearing the night we last spoke on the phone. We discussed her plans in the coming hours to attend a weekly protest against an illegal Israeli settlement built on occupied Palestinian land belonging to the people of Beita. As we reluctantly ended the call, I told her that I loved her, and I asked her to send me a text both before she left and after she had safely returned. Hours later, I awoke in the dark and instinctively checked my phone: no texts. I quickly sent her a message and tried to go back to sleep. My phone rang two minutes later and I was given the news that Aysenur had been shot in the head and killed.
According to eyewitnesses and investigations by journalists, she was shot after about 20 minutes of calm, sheltering behind an olive tree hundreds of feet away from most of the protesters and Israeli soldiers.
In moments, I stare at the black pants I wore to her funeral, still carrying the dirt from her grave. I was in Turkey helping to coordinate the arrival of her remains when I read the Israeli military’s initial response to her killing. They claimed falsely that Aysenur was shot accidentally during a violent protest, an assertion that was swiftly debunked by multiple eyewitness accounts and major news outlets.
I was dumbfounded — was I really supposed to accept that an Israeli soldier accidentally shot her in the head from hundreds of feet away? And that my own government found this explanation acceptable enough to forgo holding accountable the foreign military responsible? Was I supposed to forget the long history of Israeli soldiers unlawfully killing U.S. citizens with impunity, like the renowned Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022?
Aysenur’s killer, who unprovokedly fired a bullet into her skull, remains unpunished just like the soldier who killed Shireen, further emboldening Israeli soldiers to take the lives of U.S. citizens, Palestinians and others with impunity.
I now stand in our closet to pick out the suit I will wear while our family meets next week with the State Department and members of Congress to plead with them to do something about Aysenur’s senseless killing. We will ask them to support our family’s call for an independent U.S. investigation into her death and accountability for the soldier that killed her. I urge President Biden to prioritize this case in the last days of his administration and uphold justice for our family.
If the U.S. had held Israel accountable for the killing of other Americans like Rachel Corrie or Shireen Abu Akleh, perhaps Israeli soldiers would not feel so emboldened to kill Americans, and other civilians, today. Perhaps, instead of standing in this closet now alone and paralyzed with pain, I would be with Aysenur trying to pick out what we would wear to dinner.
Hamid Ali is the widower of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi.
