Shireen Abu Akleh was a journalist born in east Jerusalem to a Palestinian Arab Christian (Melkite Catholic) family. She studied at Yarmouk University, Jordan, and spent time in the USA. She had both Palestinian and US citizenship.

She was well-known in the Middle East, as she had been covering the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory for 25 years.

On 11 May 2022, she was covering an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. She was with several colleagues in a safe area away from clashes and crossfire, although there was an Israeli army convoy about 200 metres away. She was wearing a helmet, and a vest with “PRESS” clearly showing her to be a non-combatant.

She was shot dead, and her colleagues who came to her aid were also targeted with gunfire.

Immediately after the death, the administration of then-US President Joe Biden (like Abu Akleh, an American Catholic) said the perpetrators should be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law”.

At first, Israel denied any wrongdoing, and instead claimed that she had been hit by a stray Palestinian bullet.

However, in the face of mounting evidence, Israel admitted responsibility, alleging that the shooting had been an accident. The USA responded by dropping its demands that the killing should be investigated by Israel.

In November 2022, the US Federal Bureau for Investigation (FBI) opened its own investigation into the unlawful death of a US citizen, that was welcomed by rights groups and Arab civil society in the USA. However, it reached no conclusion, because Israel refused to cooperate with the investigation.

The Palestinian Authority handed over the bullet that killed Abu Akleh to forensic experts in the USA. However, two days after receiving it, then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the analysis was “inconclusive” because the bullet was badly damaged.

The United Nations human rights office said that information it had gathered confirmed eye-witness reports showing that the bullet that killed Abu Akleh was fired by Israeli forces.

The same conclusion – that Abu Akleh was deliberately killed by Israeli forces – was reached by CNN after receiving two videos of the event, and also by Palestinian legal rights group Al-Haq jointly with Forensic Architecture, a UK-based group that specialises in open-source analysis and architecture techniques.

Abu Akleh’s family, with the backing of the Palestinian press syndicate, filed a request for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to open a case against Israel for the killing, and Al Jazeera Media Network filed a similar request.

On 16 October 2023, a United Nations International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, after examining eight witness testimonies and a review of the open-source information as well as investigations carried out by news outlets including Al Jazeera, CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times, concluded that Israeli forces used “lethal force without justification” in targeting Abu Akleh.

On 26 October 2023, the Israeli military bulldozed a memorial that had been erected at the site where Abu Akleh was killed.

Many more details of all the above are given in a Wikipedia page dedicated to the killing.

The evidence seems overwhelming, yet no case has been brought to trial after three years.

Journalists targeted

One effective way to gag news is to kill the messenger, and Israel has a history of killing journalists, including cameramen. This, however, has become less and less effective, with the advent of smartphones with cameras, and the internet, such that footage can be uploaded immediately to the rest of the world.

It is impossible to give a precise figure for the number of journalists killed by Israel, as the war continues and bodies still lie under the rubble of Gaza.

Wikipedia gives a list of journalists known to have been killed by Israel since 7 October 2023. It amounts to 159 killed in Gaza and the West Bank, and eight in Lebanon. A further 55 journalists are categorised as injured (usually in Israeli airstrikes) or shot but not killed by Israelis. That give a total of 222 over a period of a year and a half, or over 12 per month on average.

Journalists around the world ought to be concerned that their professional colleagues are being targeted in this way, as an assault on freedom of speech and information.