21 years after her death in Gaza, Palestinians remember U.S. activist Rachel Corrie

AMMAN, Jordan — Twenty-one years ago this month, Rachel Corrie, a young American activist, was protesting the Israeli demolition of homes in the Gaza Strip. Bulldozers had already destroyed the surrounding houses in the neighborhood of Rafah where she was based; on March 16, 2003, they came for the Nasrallah family home where the college student was staying.

Corrie, wearing an orange fluorescent vest and speaking through a bullhorn, was determined to stop them. Standing alone on a mound of earth in the path of the armored vehicle, she expected the Israeli bulldozer approaching her to come to a halt, as other bulldozers had done when faced with international protesters.

But it kept going, and, as her fellow activists screamed and tried to stop it, the 23-year-old college student from Olympia, Washington, was crushed to death. The Nasrallah family's children watched in horror through a crack in their garden wall.

Since her death, Corrie's legacy has echoed through the years in Gaza and the region, where people name their children after her. It still resonates in the United States, where her journals were turned into books and a play. Her death two decades ago points to a continuing Israel has destroyed almost half of all homes since October, when the war with Hamas started.