Joseph Smith, 20, a student and a fellow activist from Missouri, said: “She was sitting in the path of the bulldozer. The bulldozer saw her and ran over her. She ended up completely underneath it. He absolutely knew she was there.”

Greg Schnabel, 28, from Chicago said: "Rachel was alone in front of the house as we were trying to get them to stop," he said.

She waved for bulldozer to stop and waved. She fell down and the bulldozer kept going. We yelled 'stop, stop', and the bulldozer didn't stop at all."

"It had completely run over her and then it reversed and ran back over her," he said.

A member of the group, who described herself only as Alice from London, England, said she and Corrie were seated in front of houses belonging to their friends as the bulldozers approached.

Alice said they had been seated for three hours and the driver of the bulldozer must have seen them before driving over Rachel.

Standing in the path of an approaching military bulldozer, Corrie lost her footing as it drew close and was first hit by a massive load of sand and debris being pushed ahead by its blade, then struck by the blade itself, witnesses said.

"I saw her in front of the bulldozer, and suddenly she disappeared from view," said Palestinian physician Samir Masri, whose family had been playing host to a group of protesters that included Corrie. "I ran out to her and saw her bleeding face, her crushed skull. I tried to treat her, but everything was broken."

Nicholas Durie, aged 19, from Dundee, was one of four British and four American campaigners who tried to block two bulldozers destroying homes and farming infrastructure near an olive grove. "We were trying to frustrate their efforts by getting in front of the bulldozers," he told The Independent by telephone from the hospital. "One of the drivers saw Rachel and drove towards her. She didn't get out of the way, and he didn't stop.

"She was carried up with a heap of earth in the shovel of the bulldozer. The driver continued working. She slipped and fell and was run over by the bulldozer. The driver saw that she had fallen, but carried her along for another 16 feet. Only then did he back off."

In an e-mail message this month, Ms. Corrie described a Feb. 14 standoff in which members of her group "stood in the path of the bulldozers and were physically pushed with the shovel backwards, taking shelter in a house." She added that "the bulldozer then proceeded on its course, demolishing one side of the house" with the protesters still inside.

The Israeli troops "have shot over our heads, and shot near our feet — they have fired tear gas at us," said Michael Shaik, media coordinator for the group. "But we thought we had an understanding. We didn't think they would kill us."

After braving tear gas and gunfire, Rachel Corrie apparently climbed before the maw of an armored bulldozer, eyeball-to-eyeball with its driver in the volatile area near the Egyptian border.

"She was standing on top of the pile of earth, and she was wearing a fluorescent orange jacket. She was clearly visible," said Richard Purssell, 31, one of eight activists - four Americans and four Brits - from the peace group International Solidarity Movement, who spent the afternoon using their bodies to block the bulldozers.

"Then she slid down the pile of earth and the bulldozer kept going. She disappeared...and I heard her scream and then the bulldozer went straight over her body."

Purssell and other members of the group said Corrie was deliberately plowed over as the army was demolishing property.

Corrie was dead of massive head and chest injuries by the time she arrived at nearby Najar hospital in Rafah, said the hospital's director, Dr. Ali Moussa.

Rafah:  Rachel Corrie Murdered by Israeli Army

At about 5.20 pm today, 16 March 2003, Rachel Corrie from Olympia in Washington State, USA died of her injuries in A-Najar Hospital in Rafah after
being deliberately run over by an Israeli military bulldozer.

Rachel had been working as an ISM activist in Rafah for seven weeks
when she was killed trying to prevent the demolition of Palestinian
homes and property in the Hi Salaam area of Rafah. 

The confrontation between the ISM and the Israeli Army had been
under way for two hours when Rachel was run over.  Rachel and the
other activists had clearly identified themselves as unarmed
international peace activists throughout the confrontation.

The Israeli Army are attempting to dishonour her memory by claiming
that Rachel was killed accidentally when she ran in front of the
bulldozer.  Eye-witnesses to the murder insist that this is totally
untrue.  Rachel was sitting in the path of the bulldozer as it
advanced towards her.  When the bulldozer refused to stop or turn
aside she climbed up onto the mound of dirt and rubble being
gathered in front of it wearing a fluorescent jacket to look
directly at the driver who kept on advancing.  The bulldozer
continued to advance so that she was pulled under the pile of dirt
and rubble.  After she had disappeared from view the driver kept
advancing until the bulldozer was completely on top of her.  The
driver did not lift the bulldozer blade and so she was crushed
beneath it.  Then the driver backed off and the seven other ISM
activists taking part in the action rushed to dig out her body.  An
ambulance rushed her to A-Najar hospital where she died.

Rachel joins 1,900 Palestinians who have been killed by Israeli
soldiers and settlers since September 2000,

Rachel had been staying in Palestinian homes threatened with illegal demolition, and today Rachel was standing with other non-violent international activists in front of a home scheduled for illegal demolition. According to witnesses, Rachel was run over twice by the Israeli military bulldozer in its process of demolishing the Palestinian home. Witnesses say that Rachel was clearly visible to the bulldozer driver, and was doing nothing to provoke an attack.

Excerpts from an e-mail from Rachel Corrie to her family on February 7, 2003.

I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now, and I still have very few words to describe what I see. It is most difficult for me to think about what's going on here when I sit down to write back to the United States--something about the virtual portal into luxury. I don't know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons. I think, although I'm not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere. An eight-year-old was shot and killed by an Israeli tank two days before I got here, and many of the children murmur his name to me, "Ali"--or point at the posters of him on the walls. The children also love to get me to practice my limited Arabic by asking me "Kaif Sharon?" "Kaif Bush?" and they laugh when I say "Bush Majnoon" "Sharon Majnoon" back in my limited Arabic. (How is Sharon? How is Bush? Bush is crazy. Sharon is crazy.) Of course this isn't quite what I believe, and some of the adults who have the English correct me: Bush mish Majnoon... Bush is a businessman. Today I tried to learn to say "Bush is a tool", but I don't think it translated quite right. But anyway, there are eight-year-olds here much more aware of the workings of the global power structure than I was just a few years ago--at least regarding Israel.

Nevertheless, I think about the fact that no amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can't imagine it unless you see it, and even then you are always well aware that your experience is not at all the reality: what with the difficulties the Israeli Army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen, and with the fact that I have money to buy water when the army destroys wells, and, of course, the fact that I have the option of leaving. Nobody in my family has been shot, driving in their car, by a rocket launcher from a tower at the end of a major street in my hometown. I have a home. I am allowed to go see the ocean. Ostensibly it is still quite difficult for me to be held for months or years on end without a trial (this because I am a white US citizen, as opposed to so many others). When I leave for school or work I can be relatively certain that there will not be a heavily armed soldier waiting half way between Mud Bay and downtown Olympia at a checkpoint-a soldier with the power to decide whether I can go about my business, and whether I can get home again when I'm done. So, if I feel outrage at arriving and entering briefly and incompletely into the world in which these children exist, I wonder conversely about how it would be for them to arrive in my world.

They know that children in the United States don't usually have their parents shot and they know they sometimes get to see the ocean. But once you have seen the ocean and lived in a silent place, where water is taken for granted and not stolen in the night by bulldozers, and once you have spent an evening when you haven't wondered if the walls of your home might suddenly fall inward waking you from your sleep, and once you've met people who have never lost anyone-- once you have experienced the reality of a world that isn't surrounded by murderous towers, tanks, armed "settlements" and now a giant metal wall, I wonder if you can forgive the world for all the years of your childhood spent existing--just existing--in resistance to the constant stranglehold of the world's fourth largest military--backed by the world's only superpower--in it's attempt to erase you from your home. That is something I wonder about these children. I wonder what would happen if they really knew.

As an afterthought to all this rambling, I am in Rafah, a city of about 140,000 people, approximately 60 percent of whom are refugees--many of whom are twice or three times refugees. Rafah existed prior to 1948, but most of the people here are themselves or are descendants of people who were relocated here from their homes in historic Palestine--now Israel. Rafah was split in half when the Sinai returned to Egypt. Currently, the Israeli army is building a fourteen-meter-high wall between Rafah in Palestine and the border, carving a no-mans land from the houses along the border. Six hundred and two homes have been completely bulldozed according to the Rafah Popular Refugee Committee. The number of homes that have been partially destroyed is greater.

Today as I walked on top of the rubble where homes once stood, Egyptian soldiers called to me from the other side of the border, "Go! Go!" because a tank was coming. Followed by waving and "what's your name?". There is something disturbing about this friendly curiosity. It reminded me of how much, to some degree, we are all kids curious about other kids: Egyptian kids shouting at strange women wandering into the path of tanks. Palestinian kids shot from the tanks when they peak out from behind walls to see what's going on. International kids standing in front of tanks with banners. Israeli kids in the tanks anonymously, occasionally shouting-- and also occasionally waving--many forced to be here, many just aggressive, shooting into the houses as we wander away.

In addition to the constant presence of tanks along the border and in the western region between Rafah and settlements along the coast, there are more IDF towers here than I can count--along the horizon,at the end of streets. Some just army green metal. Others these strange spiral staircases draped in some kind of netting to make the activity within anonymous. Some hidden,just beneath the horizon of buildings. A new one went up the other day in the time it took us to do laundry and to cross town twice to hang banners. Despite the fact that some of the areas nearest the border are the original Rafah with families who have lived on this land for at least a century, only the 1948 camps in the center of the city are Palestinian controlled areas under Oslo. But as far as I can tell, there are few if any places that are not within the sights of some tower or another. Certainly there is no place invulnerable to apache helicopters or to the cameras of invisible drones we hear buzzing over the city for hours at a time.

I've been having trouble accessing news about the outside world here, but I hear an escalation of war on Iraq is inevitable. There is a great deal of concern here about the "reoccupation of Gaza." Gaza is reoccupied every day to various extents, but I think the fear is that the tanks will enter all the streets and remain here, instead of entering some of the streets and then withdrawing after some hours or days to observe and shoot from the edges of the communities. If people aren't already thinking about the consequences of this war for the people of the entire region then I hope they will start.

I also hope you'll come here. We've been wavering between five and six internationals. The neighborhoods that have asked us for some form of presence are Yibna, Tel El Sultan, Hi Salam, Brazil, Block J, Zorob, and Block O. There is also need for constant night-time presence at a well on the outskirts of Rafah since the Israeli army destroyed the two largest wells. According to the municipal water office the wells destroyed last week provided half of Rafah's water supply. Many of the communities have requested internationals to be present at night to attempt to shield houses from further demolition. After about ten p.m. it is very difficult to move at night because the Israeli army treats anyone in the streets as resistance and shoots at them. So clearly we are too few.

I continue to believe that my home, Olympia, could gain a lot and offer a lot by deciding to make a commitment to Rafah in the form of a sister-community relationship. Some teachers and children's groups have expressed interest in e-mail exchanges, but this is only the tip of the iceberg of solidarity work that might be done. Many people want their voices to be heard, and I think we need to use some of our privilege as internationals to get those voices heard directly in the US, rather than through the filter of well-meaning internationals such as myself. I am just beginning to learn, from what I expect to be a very intense tutelage, about the ability of people to organize against all odds, and to resist against all odds.

Thanks for the news I've been getting from friends in the US. I just read a report back from a friend who organized a peace group in Shelton, Washington, and was able to be part of a delegation to the large January 18th protest in Washington DC. People here watch the media, and they told me again today that there have been large protests in the United States and "problems for the government" in the UK. So thanks for allowing me to not feel like a complete polyanna when I tentatively tell people here that many people in the United States do not support the policies of our government, and that we are learning from global examples how to resist.