Today marks the 17th anniversary of the assassination of Rachel Corrie by the Israeli military bulldozers in Rafah.
Rachel Corrie, a human rights activist, visited Gaza in 2002 as a part of her senior-year college assignment to connect her town with Rafah. While in Gaza, she joined a pro-Palestinian group (International Solidarity Movement) aiming at preventing the Israeli forces from demolishing Palestinians' homes.
On March 16th, 2003, the Israeli occupation forces brutally crushed Rachel Corrie to death as she attempted to stop a military Israeli bulldozer aiming at destroying Palestinian civil buildings in Rafah.
Foreign journalists and ISM protestors testified that the driver of the Israeli bulldozer deliberately ran over Corrie's body twice. Other Israeli eyewitnesses said that the bulldozer's operator could not see her and it was an accident.
Israeli authorities later opened an investigation into Corrie's assassination and stated that it was an accident in which the bulldozer's operator could not see her. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B'Tseleem, and Yesh Din criticized the investigations.
Commemorating Corrie's death, her mother established a US humanitarian, charitable institute to support the Palestinians and named it "Rachel Corrie's Institute for Peace and Justice".
Rachel Corrie had been known since she was young with her love for peace and defense for the Palestinians' rights to live in peace and security.
"Academic works, books, conferences, movies, stories, novels would never let me recognize the situation here in Gaza under the Israeli occupation. It is unimaginable," Corrie said in her last letter to her family in the USA.
She believed that confronting the Israeli bulldozers will transfer the meaning of the misery the Palestinians live in into the whole world.
17 years passed since this brutal global crime. International Criminal Court did not sentence those Israeli killers and Palestinians never forgot Rachel's sacrifice and courage.
