Savages

By : Mouin Rabbani

For more than two decades Shireen Abu Akleh, Al Jazeera’s veteran television reporter, has been a fixture in Palestinian and Arab living rooms. Intrepid, empathetic, and intelligent in equal measure, her narration of developments in the occupied territories since the late 1990s—and there have been many—serves as a collective Palestinian memoir of this turbulent and often tragic period.

To her people she was one of their increasingly rare champions, her heart demonstrably in the right place, her reporting invariably trustworthy. Her summary execution by the Israeli military in the West Bank’s Jenin refugee camp in the early morning of 11 May instantaneously produced shock, grief, and outrage on a national scale and indeed throughout the region. Although Israel has killed in excess of forty-five journalists since 2000, the case of Abu Akleh seems to take this practice to an entirely new level.

The facts of the matter are not in doubt and are clear as daylight. On her last morning, Abu Akleh, along with several colleagues, all clearly and visibly identifiable as members of the media, went to Jenin refugee camp to report on Israel’s latest armed raid on this symbol of Palestinian dispossession and defiance. There was no crossfire, and there were no clashes in or near the area where the reporters set up to do their job. From a distance of approximately 150 meters, a trained Israeli military sniper fired a single bullet at the exposed area between her flack jacket and helmet. A second reporter, Ali Samudi, was subsequently wounded by a single bullet to the back, as was—in what has become standard Israeli military procedure – a Palestinian resident who attempted to come to their rescue.

Whether the sniper was acting on his own initiative or following orders, and whether those responsible were aware of Abu Akleh’s identity or simply had the summary execution of a journalist as their goal, remains unclear. But snipers as a rule shoot after receiving authorization, Abu Akleh had been a thorn in the military’s side for decades, and she had previously expressed concern she might be targeted. 

Perhaps apprised that Abu Akleh is a US citizen, Israel resorted to its tried and true damage control methods of misdirection and obfuscation. It initially claimed that Abu Akleh had been killed by one of “dozens” of Palestinian gunmen “firing wildly” in the vicinity of the incident, and quickly circulated a video clip of several shooting Palestinians to lay the matter to rest. Yet geolocation reviews confirmed that, unlike the sniper who killed her, the nearest gunmen were in a different area of the camp, lacking not only a line of sight but also the weapons to precisely hit three separate individuals with only three bullets. More to the point, her surviving colleagues were emphatic that they had been fired upon by Israeli soldiers, whom they could clearly see, without warning or provocation. 

Israel subsequently called for a joint investigation with the Palestinian Authority, its primary goal being sole custody of the bullet that killed Abu Akleh. Yet Israeli investigations—routinely announced, rarely conducted, and never transparent or impartial—have been dismissed by human rights organizations the world over as exercises designed to protect the impunity of perpetrators and thwart accountability. Its options narrowing, Israel allowed that, pending further investigation, it was now uncertain who precisely killed Abu Akleh but confident this could not have been a deliberate act by its army of occupation. 

A more telling indication of Israel’s calculated and comprehensive inhumanity towards those it has systematically brutalized as a matter of policy was provided that same day. In scenes that have played out with disturbing regularity in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1967, Israeli forces stormed into the Abu Akleh family home in Jerusalem where mourners had gathered, physically assaulting a number of them and tearing down Palestinian flags. The incident would prove but a precursor to her 13 May funeral in Jerusalem.