On 16 March 2003 the activists were acting as human shields to try to stop the Israeli army demolishing Palestinian homes and clearing land around Rafah. Corrie, standing in the path of a bulldozer, fell in front of the machine, which ran over her. She was then taken to a hospital with a fractured skull, shattered ribs and punctured lungs, and died of her injuries. The Israeli government claimed that it was an accident since the bulldozer operator could not see her.

“I reached the conclusion that there was no negligence on the part of the bulldozer driver”, Judge Oded Gershon said, reading out his verdict on Tuesday at the Haifa District Court in northern Israel. “I reject the suit. There is no justification to demand the state pay any damages”. The Corries family had requested a symbolic $1 in damages and legal expenses. Gershon said Israeli soldiers had done their utmost to keep people away from the site.

“The deceased put herself into a dangerous situation, she stood in front of a giant bulldozer in a place where the operator could not see her. She did not distance herself as a reasonable person would have done”, he said. “Her death is the result of an accident she brought upon herself”.

The judge also said that a 2003 Israeli military police investigation – which found Rachel Corrie had been killed by falling earth as a result of her own irresponsible behaviour and which had been criticised by senior US officials – had been properly conducted.

Family disappointed by court decision

The civil case is the latest in a series brought forward by Rachel Corrie’s parents. Cindy and Craig Corrie, who once again travelled to Israel from the US to pursue their case, were upset after the ruling was read out. “I am hurt”, Cindy Corrie said after the verdict was read. “We are, of course, deeply saddened and deeply troubled by what we heard today from Judge Oded Gershon”.

Al Jazeera’s Cal Perry, reporting from Haifa, said: “The family are disappointed that there was no criticism at all towards the Israeli army. Israel is known for not giving an inch in cases like this at all”.

Background: Rachel Corrie’s death

Corrie was a committed peace activist even before her arrival in the Gaza Strip in 2002. She arranged peace events in her home town in Washington State and became a volunteer for the ISM.

Pictures taken on the day Corrie died – 16 March 2003 – show her in an orange high-visibility jacket carrying a megaphone and blocking the path of an Israeli military bulldozer. Witnesses said Corrie was hit by a bulldozer which was razing Palestinian homes. The army said the operation was needed to deny guerrillas cover.

Israel’s far-right Yisrael Beitenu party, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, heralded the verdict, calling it “vindication after vilification”. In its inquiry, the army suggested that the fatal blow came from a falling slab of concrete.

Corrie’s death made her a symbol of the uprising. While her family battled through the courts to establish who was responsible for her killing, her story was dramatised on stage in a dozen countries and told in the book Let Me Stand Alone. An aid ship intercepted by the Israeli military in 2010 while trying to break the blockade of Gaza was named after her. 

Honour award to Rachel 

A new global honour “The Housing Rights Defender Award“ has gone to Rachel Corrie. Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) launched the annual Housing Rights Awards in 2002 to focus attention on the plight of more than one billion people worldwide who it said live in slums and some 100 million people who are homeless on any given night. In other awards by the COHRE announced in Geneva on Wednesday, Indonesia, Guatemala and Serbia-Montenegro shared the honours for failing to address a massive problem of homelessness and slums. Scotland was praised for its “rare” protection of the right to housing.

Other activists killed by Israelis

Tom Hurndall was a 21-year-old photojournalism student who travelled to the Gaza Strip as part of the International Solidarity Movement. He was shot in the head in April 2003 by an Israeli army sniper while trying to rescue Palestinian children in the street. He never regained consciousness and died nine months later in a London hospital. 

British cameraman James Miller, 34, was shot dead by another soldier from the same Israeli unit just a mile away three weeks later. He was in Rafah while making a documentary for a US cable channel. An autopsy confirmed he was almost certainly killed by an Israeli soldier, despite the army’s assertions of the contrary. Video evidence clearly showed Miller and his team carrying white flags and shouting to Israeli soldiers that they were British journalists. 

Tristan Anderson, 38, had three brain operations after being shot in the head with a high-velocity tear gas canister by Israeli security forces on 13 March 2009. Anderson, who survived with major brain damage, was in the West Bank village of Nilin, protesting with Palestinian farmers against the construction of Israel’s “separation wall”.