The American-Turkish activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, who was killed by Israeli gunfire in the West Bank a week ago, was buried in her family’s hometown in southwestern Turkey on Saturday.

The American-Turkish activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, who was killed by Israeli gunfire in the West Bank a week ago, was buried in her family’s hometown in southwestern Turkey on Saturday. 

The activist’s body arrived in Turkey on Friday in a flat top coffin, wrapped in the Turkish flag and carried by soldiers, in a ceremony that is usually reserved for fallen troops, CNN reported. 

Her coffin was placed outside Didim Central Mosque on Saturday, where hundreds of people gathered to pay their respects to the 26-year-old. A smaller event later took place at a cemetery where an imam read verses from the Quran and mourners laid white flowers on her grave.

Eygi, who was born in Turkey and had joint US citizenship, was shot by Israeli forces while taking part in a weekly protest against an Israeli settlement near the Palestinian village of Beita. All Israeli settlements are considered illegal under international law.

She was a recent graduate of the University of Washington, and had been volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the same pro-Palestinian activist group as Rachel Corrie, a US citizen killed in 2003 while attempting to stop an Israeli bulldozer from demolishing Palestinian homes in Gaza.

The Israeli army said it was “highly likely” that Eygi was “hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire.”

The speaker of Turkey’s Grand National Assembly, Numan Kurtulmu? spoke outside of the mosque during the procession and said Eygi’s killing was “not the fault of a handful of Israeli soldiers, this is the crime of a terrorist state.”

Kurtulmu? indirectly referred to President Joe Biden, calling him “so far from humanity” for describing Eygi’s death as an apparent accident.

The ISM has criticized Biden for refusing Eygi’s family’s demands for an independent and transparent investigation into her death.

An autopsy report prepared by the Palestinian Authority suggested that Eygi was directly shot in the head by Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank, according to three forensic experts who reviewed the dossier.

The report, dated 6 September and drafted by a Palestinian medical committee led by Dr Rayyan al-Ali, contradicts the version of events given by Israel and the US president, who said the bullet that killed Eygi appeared to have “ricocheted off the ground”. 

Three separate forensic experts who viewed the autopsy report told Middle East Eye that the damage on Ezgi’s skull and the destruction within suggest that it was a direct hit.