The Mirror · ilRoot Wikipedia's own words, with the distortions marked. This is not Wikipedia; the text below is theirs, unedited, reproduced under CC BY-SA. the drift report · case files · the full audit · the data

Rachel Corrie

As it reads on Wikipedia · 1 finding marked in the text · see twenty years of this article's openings

Rachel Aliene Corrie (April 10, 1979 – March 16, 2003) was an American nonviolence activist and diarist. She was a member of the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM), and was active throughout the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. In 2003, she was in Rafah, a city in the Gaza Strip then under Israeli occupation, where the demolishment of Palestinian houses by Israeli forces was taking place at the height of the Second Intifada. While protesting the demolitions as they were being carried out, she was killed by an Israeli driving an armored bulldozer that crushed her. Corrie was born in Olympia, Washington, in 1979. After graduating from Capital High School, she went on to attend Evergreen State College. She took a year off from her studies to work as a volunteer in the Washington State Conservation Corps, where she spent three years making weekly visits to mental patients. While at Evergreen State College, she became a "committed peace activist", arranging peace events through a local group called "Olympians for Peace and Solidarity". She later joined the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) organization in order to protest the policies of the Israeli army in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Corrie went to Gaza as part of her college's senior-year independent-study proposal to connect Olympia and Rafah with each other as sister cities. While in Rafah on March 16, 2003, she joined other ISM activists in efforts to nonviolently prevent Israel's demolition of Palestinian property, where she was killed by an Israeli bulldozer that crushed her. Corrie's death sparked controversy and led to international media coverage. Physicians present and fellow ISM activists stated that Corrie had been wearing a high-visibility vest and was deliberately driven over, while the Israeli army said that it was an accident because the bulldozer operator did not see her. Following the incident, an Israeli military investigation concluded that Corrie's death was the result of an accident and that the bulldozer operator had limited visibility. The ruling attracted criticism from organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW), B'Tselem, and Yesh Din. HRW stated that the ruling represented a pattern of impunity for Israeli forces. In 2012, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro stated that the Israeli investigation was unsatisfactory, lacking thoroughness, credibility and transparency, and that therefore the U.S. government was unsatisfied with the investigation's closure.

What the highlighted wording does
1
㉓ Reviewed in the sweep
Rachel Corrie was an American activist killed in Rafah, Gaza in 2003 when an Israeli military bulldozer crushed her during a protest against home demolitions. Through 2005 the opening framed her death as contested: "Her death sparked intense controversy, with various advocates blaming it on the IDF, the ISM, Palestinian terror, and on Corrie herself," and separately noted that the circumstances of her death were disputed. Today's opening carries neither the controversy nor the dispute; the word terror is gone from the opening though it survives 9 times in the body, and the text states flatly that she "was killed by an Israeli armored bulldozer that crushed her." A reader today does not learn that the opening once described her death as a contested question with competing accounts, including one that blamed Palestinian terror groups.
The same lead, over time
The article text above is from "Rachel Corrie" by Wikipedia contributors, reproduced unmodified under CC BY-SA 4.0. The highlights and numbered findings are ours: Shoresh, ilroot.com. Our copy of this lead was retrieved on 2026-07-24 and is held in our published data so the comparison survives any future edit.