The 23-year-old was wearing a bright orange vest at the time, and used a megaphone to urge the driver of the heavily armored vehicle to turn back, following the procedures adopted by the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a U.S.-based organization.

"We were shouting and waving our arms at the driver," said Tom Dale, another ISM activist, to the New York Times. "We even had a megaphone.

"She thought they’d stop, but they kept going," said Dale, who is from the United Kingdom, in another interview. "She tried to stand up and fell over backwards. The bulldozer dragged her under its blade."

Protester Greg Schnabel said that the machine had "completely run over her and then it reversed and ran back over her." Corrie died of head and chest injuries by the time she reached Rafah’s nearby Najar hospital.

Michael Shaik, a spokesman for the solidarity group, noted that Israeli soldiers "have shot over our heads, and shot near our feet--they have fired tear gas at us. But we thought we had an understanding. We didn’t think they would kill us."

In a March 17 statement the Israeli military claimed, "The bulldozer operator did not see the woman."

The soldiers "were dealing with a group of protesters who were acting very irresponsibly, putting everybody in danger--the Palestinians, themselves and our forces," said an Israeli official, "by intentionally placing themselves in a combat zone."

Three days later the same bulldozer was among the vehicles of an Israeli unit that disrupted Corrie’s memorial service, held at the spot at which she had been run over.  
 
‘Systematic destruction’ of housing
The soldiers tried to break up the service, reported the UK Guardian. "They started firing tear gas and blowing smoke, then they fired sound grenades.... Then the tank came over and shot in the air," said Joe Smith, from Kansas City.

At a memorial event in Gaza City Palestinians carried mock coffins of the young woman. Residents of Olympia, Washington--Corrie’s home city--organized a vigil on the day of her death, while fellow students at Evergreen State College erected a shrine in her honor.

Corrie had lived with Palestinian families in Rafah for two months in an area where many houses had been demolished. "I feel like what I’m witnessing here is a very systematic destruction of people’s ability to survive," she told reporters two days before her death.

"I am in Rafah, a city of about 140,000 people approximately 60 percent of whom are refugees," Corrie had written in a February 7 letter to her family.

Rafah has stood in the Sinai desert since before the creation of the Israeli state. Following Tel Aviv’s wars of occupation, it is divided between Egyptian and Israeli territory.

"Currently, the Israeli army is building a 14-meter-high wall between Rafah in Palestine and the border, carving a no-man’s land from the houses along the border," Corrie wrote. "Six hundred and two homes have been completely bulldozed, according to the Rafah Popular Refugee Committee."

The Associated Press reported on March 16 that "Israel sends tanks and bulldozers into the area almost every day, destroying buildings near the Gaza-Egypt border."

According to the Palestine Ministry of Health, Israeli assaults in February killed 82 Palestinians and wounded 616 others, sparking renewed resistance and large turnouts at funeral marches in the occupied territories. Two weeks before Corrie’s murder a military bulldozer had killed a nine-month pregnant Palestinian woman, Nuha Sweidan, while destroying a house next door in a Gaza refugee camp.  
 
 
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