EDITORIAL: Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh was a familiar face on the region’s TV screens as she covered major news events in occupied Palestinian territories, usually funerals of Palestinians killed by Israeli occupation forces. Last Wednesday her own body, draped in Palestinian flag, was carried through the streets of Jenin where she was shot dead while covering an Israeli raid in that West Bank city.
Another colleague, producer Ali al Samoudi was shot in the back, fortunately, he has survived. It is worth noting that when a bullet hit her near the ear, she was wearing a flak jacket clearly marked with the word “press” as well as a helmet. Expressing dismay and anger over the killing the news outlet said: “the occupation forces assassinated in cold blood” its correspondent in Palestine.
As the incident drew widespread condemnation, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett tried to shift the blame to the other side, saying, “it appears likely that armed Palestinians, who were indiscriminately firing at the time, were responsible for the unfortunate death of the journalist.” But all witness accounts have negated his claim.
According to the wounded Samoudi, there was no Palestinian military resistance at all at the scene, and that they were still preparing to film the Israeli army operation when without warning a first a bullet hit him and the second one hit Shireen. An AFP photographer also confirmed there were no Palestinian gunmen visible in the area when Abu Aqleh was killed.
Later on, an independent Israeli human rights group, B’ Tselem, said its investigators had concluded that the Palestinian gunfire seen in the video could not possibly have been the gunshots that hit Shireen and Samoudi. As it happens, Israeli forces are used to targeting Palestinian journalists with impunity.
In May of last year, they had bombed a building in the Gaza Strip housing the offices of Al Jazeera and Associated Press. Before that in 2019, a UN Human Rights Council commission of inquiry found “reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli snipers shot journalists intentionally, despite seeing that they were clearly marked as such during the 2018 protests along the border of Gaza and Israel”.
All calls for an end to such crimes have kept falling on deaf ears, impelling the International Federation of Journalists, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, and the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians to file a joint complaint, just a few days ago, with the International Criminal Court about “systematic targeting of Palestinian journalists.”
Al Jazeera now wants the international community to hold Israeli forces accountable for their “intentional targeting and killing” of its correspondent. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has also called for an independent investigation into the killing. Backed by the US, Israel has so far been able to shrug off all such demands. But the latest atrocity seems to put them both in an awkward quandary since the slain journalist was an American of Palestinian origin.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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