Tel Aviv Tribune’s veteran correspondent, Shireen Abu Akleh, was killed 1,000 days ago as he covered an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank occupied on May 11, 2022.
She wore a clearly marked press and press vest when she was killed in what the media network of Tel Aviv Tribune condemned as a “cold blood assassination”.
Press agencies, rights defense groups and the United Nations have all conducted investigations on its murder and concluded that Akleh was killed – probably deliberately – by Israeli troops.
The murder of Shireen
A familiar name in the Arabic-speaking world, Abu Akleh was a Palestinian-American journalist who covered the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory for 25 years.
The day she was killed, she was with several colleagues in a safe area far from the clashes and cross fires, although there was a convoy of the Israeli army at around 200 meters (660 feet).
The shooting was taken on video and showed that Akleh was falling to the ground, motionless. His colleagues who tried to come to his aid were killed.
His death shocked the world and concentrated an international projector on the Israeli murders of Palestinian journalists.
According to the Committee to protect journalists (CPJ), Israel did not keep its soldiers responsible for the murder of 20 Palestinian journalists in the 22 years before Akleh’s death.
Since the War of Israel against Gaza began on October 7, 2023, CPJ noted that Israel had killed 159 Palestinian journalists.
Despite the growing evidence that Akleh has been directly targeted, there has been little political will to conduct a criminal investigation in Israel, the United States or international courts.
Here is everything you need to know about the quest for justice by Abu Akleh.
What does Israel say?
Israel first tried to divert the blame for the incident and suggested that the Palestinian fighters killed the journalist.
However, he finally brought back this assertion and recognized that his troops were responsible for his death, saying that it was “an accident”.
A week later, the Israeli army said that it would not start the fear that the treatment of its soldiers and suspects would cause controversy within Israeli society, according to Israeli reports.
A year later, the Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari said that the army was “deeply sorry” for the death of Abu Akleh, reiterating that there was no intention to launch Criminal proceedings against soldiers who are behind the murder.
The United States has abandoned its request for an Israeli criminal investigation after the apologies of Israel.
What did the United States say?
It was incoherent, to say the least
Immediately after the death of Abu Akleh, the administration of the president of the time, Joe Biden, said that the authors should be “prosecuted to the very extent of the law”.
He changed his air after Israel admitted that his soldiers killed Abu Akleh and rejected calls to a criminal investigation, saying that the shooting was an “accident” – and he abandoned the requests of Israel to investigate the authors in September 2022.
Two months later, the US Federal Bureau for Investigation (FBI) opened an investigation which was welcomed by the rights for the defense of rights and Arab civil society in the United States, but Israel would not have cooperated in the investigation .
Have the United States investigated?
The Palestinian Authority (PA), a director with limited autonomy in occupied West Bank, presented the ball that killed Abu Akleh to legal experts.
The PA said that she did not want Israel to be involved in the analysis for fear that the Israeli authorities do anything to protect their troops from responsibility.
At the time, Israel still claimed that Palestinian armed groups may have accidentally killed Abu Akleh.
But two days after receiving the ball, then the Secretary of State of the United States, Antony Blinken, said that the analysis was “not conclusive” because the ball was seriously damaged.
Who else has published surveys?
Several traditional press organizations and open source survey teams have led their own probes.
In May 2022, CNN said that it had acquired new evidence – two videos – suggesting that Abu Aqleh had been shot in an attack by Israeli forces.
A joint survey was also undertaken by the Palestinian group of legal rights al-haq and forensic architecture, a group based in the United Kingdom specializing in techniques of open source analysis and architecture.
Their results were published in September 2022 and determined that Abu Akleh had been deliberately killed.
In addition, the documentary of the front lines of Tel Aviv Tribune, the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh, was released in December 2022 and questioned the initial claims of Israel according to which she was killed by Palestinian shots or by cross lights.
Has the ICC do something?
In December 2022, Tel Aviv Tribune Media Network filed a request to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to open a case against Israel for the murder of Abu Akleh.
Akleh’s family had filed a similar request to the Court in September of the same year, supported by the Palestinian press union.
The ICC has still not revealed whether or not it will open a matter to continue justice in Abu Akleh.
What about the UN?
On October 16, 2023, an international United Nations inquiry in the occupied Palestinian territory concluded that Israeli forces used “deadly force without justification” to target Abu Akleh.
He also said that there were reasonable reasons that the Duvdevan unit of Israeli security forces had done so.
The Commission founded its conclusions on eight testimonies from witnesses and an examination of open source information as well as investigations carried out by media such as Tel Aviv Tribune, CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Tel Aviv Tribune asked that the results be given to the ICC to help his criminal investigation on the incident.
