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Early on Wednesday morning, Shireen Abu Akleh, a renowned journalist with Al Jazeera’s Arabic service, was shot in the head and killed while reporting on an Israeli raid in Jenin, a city in the occupied West Bank where Israeli forces said they were searching for suspects in recent killings of Israeli and foreign nationals. The Palestinian health ministry was quick to report that the Israeli army killed Abu Akleh, and journalists who witnessed the killing subsequently corroborated that account. Abu Akleh’s colleague Ali al-Samoudi, who was shot in the back but survived, said that there were no Palestinian fighters on the scene, which was “dead quiet”—if it hadn’t been, he said, the journalists wouldn’t have been there—and that Israeli soldiers fired on them “directly and deliberately”; Shatha Hanaysha, of the Palestinian Quds News Network, was also present and concurred, suggesting that whoever shot Abu Akleh evidently targeted an exposed part of her head since she was wearing a helmet at the time. Video footage showed that the journalists were all also wearing vests clearly marked with the word press, and that the surrounding area did indeed appear to be quiet. In a statement, Al Jazeera concluded that Israeli forces “assassinated” Abu Akleh “in cold blood.”
To begin with, at least, the official Israeli narrative couldn’t have been more different. Shortly after Abu Akleh was killed, the country’s military suggested that Palestinian gunmen were likely to blame, citing intense fighting nearby. Naftali Bennett, the prime minister, echoed that position, with his office pointing to footage, previously shown on Al Jazeera, showing gunmen in Jenin claiming to have hit an Israeli soldier; no soldier was hit, officials said, but Abu Akleh was. That assessment quickly started to unravel, however, with a researcher on the ground from B’Tselem, an Israeli rights group, reporting that the footage in question was not filmed in the vicinity of Abu Akleh’s killing; Al Jazeera’s news verification and monitoring unit later confirmed the locational discrepancy, as did NBC News. As Wednesday went on, various Israeli officials began to backpedal to a more ambiguous position. “Even if soldiers shot at—or, God forbid, hurt—someone who was not involved, this happened in battle, during a firefight, where this Palestinian is with the shooters, so this thing can happen,” a military spokesperson said. The journalists present were “filming and working for a media outlet amidst armed Palestinians. They’re armed with cameras, if you’ll permit me to say so.”
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By Wednesday evening, Benny Gantz, the defense minister, had acknowledged the possibility that Israeli soldiers may indeed have killed Abu Akleh, and said that an investigation was ongoing; a source told the Washington Post that officials were looking into three shooting incidents—focusing on one in particular, though its details run contradictory to eyewitness accounts—and that investigators had confiscated soldiers’ guns as a prelude to ballistics testing. Israeli officials also said that they had offered to jointly investigate the killing with counterparts from the Palestinian Authority, but the latter rejected this, saying that Israel cannot be trusted to investigate itself and that the PA intends to take the case to the International Criminal Court. Palestinian officials similarly rebuffed an Israeli request to examine the bullet that killed Abu Akleh under Palestinian and US supervision. Israeli officials characterized this as an effort to withhold potentially exculpatory evidence. Michael Sfard, a legal adviser to Yesh Din, a group that investigates abuses in the West Bank, told the New York Times that the Israel military should possess other evidence from the scene, including drone footage.
Despite the multiple witness accounts and Al Jazeera’s definitive statements, no little Western media coverage of Abu Akleh’s killing centered ambiguity, and was sharply scrutinized on such terms by numerous journalists and observers. An initial Times headline stating simply that Abu Akleh had “died at 51” came in for particular criticism (the headline was subsequently changed), as did various outlets’ use of euphemistic language, including the word “clashes,” a common feature of Western journalism on violence in Israel and Palestine. Critics also pointed to what they saw as double standards: around the respect accorded Palestinian witnesses, for example, and between the coverage of Abu Akleh’s killing and those of Western journalists by Russian forces in Ukraine. (Abu Akleh was a dual Palestinian and US citizen.) Yesterday, another unfortunately worded Times headline referred to “dueling” investigations in the case.
Some Western outlets, including the Post, at least included in their coverage the fact that Israeli forces have killed journalists, many of them Palestinian, before. Palestine’s information ministry puts the number at forty-five since 2000. (The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate estimates that the number is higher, though a database maintained by the Committee to Protect Journalists has a much lower figure over a longer time period.) In 2008, an Israeli tank killed Fadel Shaana, a twenty-three-year-old cameraman with Reuters; an Israeli investigation later exonerated the soldiers involved, partially on the grounds that Shaana’s camera could have been an antitank missile. In 2018, Israeli snipers shot and killed Ahmed Abu Hussein and Yasser Murtaja, both of whom were covering protests at the border between Israel and Gaza and wearing press vests. In the four years since then, according to a tally compiled by Reporters Without Borders, Israeli soldiers and police have fired either live rounds, rubber bullets, stun grenades, or tear gas at 144 Palestinian journalists, or beaten them with batons. A year ago this weekend, Israeli forces bombed a building that housed offices belonging to both Al Jazeera and the Associated Press; officials said that Hamas was using the building but, per the AP, did not provide evidence to substantiate that claim. Two weeks ago, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, along with the International Federation of Journalists and the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians, filed a war-crimes case at the ICC alleging that Israel has systematically targeted journalists in Palestine and failed to properly investigate its own abuses.
And then Abu Akleh was killed. As the news filtered through, tributes poured in from around the world and across Palestine, where she was revered by colleagues and news consumers alike. In Qatar, where Al Jazeera is based, neighboring towers lit up, respectively, with projections of her image and that of a Palestinian flag. In Gaza, her name was carved on a beach, shielded from lapping waves by a bank of sand. In the West Bank, thousands of people gathered yesterday for a memorial procession, as Abu Akleh’s body was transported to a hospital. Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, described Abu Akleh as a “martyr for truth,” and awarded her the Star of Jerusalem, or Quds Star, an honor traditionally reserved for political dignitaries. One of her colleagues told the Post that the public outpouring of grief was comparable to that which followed the death of Yasser Arafat, the former Authority leader.
As I wrote these words, Abu Akleh’s funeral was about to start. Ahead of time, Israeli police closed roads adjacent to the hospital where her body was being kept and, according to Al Jazeera, attempted to stop people from putting up posters of Abu Akleh; then, as mourners transferred her coffin from the hospital to a waiting hearse, Israeli forces beat them with batons, so much so that the coffin nearly dropped. When the hearse arrived near the church in East Jerusalem, another mourner lifted a Palestinian flag into the air. Israeli police moved in to tear it down. “They refuse to let Shireen be free,” the lawyer Diana Buttu said, “even in death.”
Below, more on Abu Akleh, Israel, and Palestine:
- Gone but not forgotten: Abu Akleh is the twelfth Al Jazeera journalist to be killed on the job since the network launched in 1996. Seven of the others—Ibrahim al-Omar, Zakariya Ibrahim, Mohamed al-Asfar, Mahran al-Deery, Mohamed al-Qasim, Hussein Abbas, and Mohamed al-Massalma—were killed in Syria; two—Tarek Ayoub and Rashid Hamid Wali—were killed in Iraq, while Ali Hassan al-Jaber was killed in Libya, and Mubarak al-Ebadi was killed in Yemen. Al Jazeera has a tribute to the twelve.
- Two views: Writing for Haaretz, Gideon Levy argues that while the “relative horror” that has greeted the killing of Abu Akleh is “justified and necessary,” it is also “belated and self-righteous.” The “blood of a famous journalist, no matter how brave and experienced she was—and she was—is no redder” than that of lesser-known victims, Levy writes. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera’s Andrew Mitrovica makes the case that Abu Akleh likely wouldn’t have made headlines in the West if she hadn’t been a joint US citizen. “That meant powerful people and institutions who normally do not give a damn when Palestinians are murdered had to say something,” Mitrovica writes.
- The Palestine beat: In October, CJR’s Karen Maniraho spoke with Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian journalist who had just been appointed as The Nation’s first Palestine correspondent. “The policies, politicians, money, and weaponry of the US influence the lives of Palestinian people on the daily,” El-Kurd said. “There should be a Palestine department in all media outlets that situate Palestinians in their headlines but never go out and seek a Palestinian perspective—or, when they do, take a very tokenizing approach. I wanted to start the trend.”
- A Pegasus update: Earlier this year, Calcalist, an Israeli business newspaper, explosively reported that police in the country used Pegasus, a potent Israeli-made spyware tool, to warrantlessly surveil the phones of powerful people, but Israel’s justice ministry subsequently refuted that finding and Calcalist pledged to reexamine its reporting, while standing by its core claim that police had used Pegasus against civilians. This week, opposition lawmakers advanced a bill that would establish a state inquiry into the spying claims—temporarily forming a majority in the Knesset after a government lawmaker left the chamber to do a TV interview. The Times of Israel has more.
Other notable stories:
- Earlier this week, Politico’s Josh Gerstein reported that a staffer in the office of the Justice Department’s inspector general had resigned after coming under scrutiny in a leak investigation into media reports about a review of Trump’s child-separation policy in 2020. BuzzFeed’s Jason Leopold now reports that as part of the probe, the inspector general’s office issued a secret subpoena to confirm the phone number of Stephanie Kirchgaessner, a reporter at The Guardian. The paper called the subpoena “egregious.”
- For CJR, Stephanie Krent and Larry Siems, of Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute, describe how they went to court to pry loose hundreds of opinions issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the secretive agency that advises the executive branch on the lawfulness of its actions. “The OLC’s opinions are part of the American story,” Krent and Siems write, “and all of us—journalists, historians, lawyers, policymakers, and the public at large—will benefit from this new window on its work.”
- According to Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt, of the Times, the Justice Department has opened a grand jury probe into the handling of classified White House records that ended up at Mar-a-Lago after Trump left office last year. Prosecutors have reportedly subpoenaed the National Archives, which confirmed earlier this year that they had to retrieve the records—and, separately, that they had to tape together documents that Trump himself had ripped up. (I wrote about this “shred scare” back in February.)
- After the Times won a Pulitzer for stories, based on secret documents pried from the Pentagon, exposing the civilian toll of US air strikes abroad and a pattern of official “opacity and impunity” in response, the paper won praise from an improbable source: the Pentagon. John Kirby, the department’s press secretary, told reporters that while he “cannot say that this process was pleasant” for officials, “that’s the whole point. It’s not supposed to be. That’s what a free press at its very best does. It holds us to account.”
- Last year, Facebook pledged that advertisers would no longer be able to target users based on personal details such as race, religion, and political affiliation. The Markup’s Angie Waller and Colin Lecher found that the company has since removed some ad categories, but that targeting based on sensitive information “is very much still available on Facebook’s platform.” The Markup’s story is the latest in its Citizen Browser project.
- The Baltimore Beat—an alt-weekly that launched in 2017 following the closure of Baltimore’s City Paper, but later shut down—will relaunch this summer as “a bi-monthly, Black-led print newspaper and website,” Baltimore magazine’s Ron Cassie reports. The Beat will aim to “build slowly and sustainably—eventually growing into a weekly publication—in part to avoid burnout from the relatively small crew,” Cassie writes.
- In the UK, Deborah James, a podcaster and former teacher, received a damehood after revealing on Monday that she is in end-of-life care after being treated for bowel cancer. James, who is forty, has been a cohost of You, Me and the Big C, a BBC podcast that has won praise for “its frank discussion of cancer,” the broadcaster notes. Since her announcement, James has raised more than four million dollars for cancer research.
- And, also in the UK, Question Time, a weekly BBC debate show typically populated by politicians and journalists, welcomed an unusual panelist last night: Sebastian Vettel, the Formula One racing driver. Vettel weighed in (somewhat sheepishly) on Brexit, and also spoke at length about the need for renewable energy. When asked by the moderator if his climate advocacy makes him a hypocrite given his job, Vettel replied, “It does.”
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