Are Israel’s attacks on Palestinian media moving up the journalist food chain?

Israeli tactics to deter Palestinian journalists from doing their work include imprisonment, fines, beatings, house arrests, and live fire. The targeting of Shireen Abu Akleh, a well-known media personality, signals an escalation in attacks by Israel on journalists attempting to expose the full detail of its decades-long occupation.

by Claudia Saba 

Veteran Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh (Photo: Creative Commons)

On 11 May 2022, veteran reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, was shot in the head while covering an Israeli military raid by elite commando unit Duvdevan, near Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. Her colleague, ​​Ali al-Samoudi, was also shot but survived. Witnesses at the scene maintain that the shots came from Israeli forces. Footage, photographs, and geolocation data have pointed to an Israeli convoy as the source of the bullets that killed Shireen and injured her colleague. Investigations by the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Bellingcat, and the UN Human Rights Office concluded that Israeli fire was responsible for her death. 

Since Shireen Abu Akleh held US citizenship, her family campaigned for a US investigation into her killing. Following a short investigation, on 4 July 2022 the US State Department concluded that an Israeli bullet was “likely responsible” for her death. To the disbelief of her supporters, the statement added that there was "no reason to believe” the shooting had been intentional.

Was the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh a targeted assassination?

There was no gunfight between Israeli occupation forces and Palestinians at the time of Abu Akleh’s shooting. Witnesses and video evidence attest to quiet before the bullets rained on Shireen and her crew. Dalia Hatuqa, a friend and colleague of Shireen’s explained:

[Shireen] was not one to take unnecessary risks -  she knew the West Bank like the back of her hand. She would never put herself or her team in harm’s way .. in one of the videos that circulated, we even see her taking cover behind a wall … all of that didn’t matter because this was a targeted killing. And that’s what is so cruel, unjust, and frightening about it - for her, for her family … for us as journalists covering this patch of land.

Occupation forces have killed dozens of lesser-known Palestinian journalists in the past. But while Israel may see “PRESS”-jacket-wearing youth on Gaza's border as easily expendable, Shireen was a long-time fixture on Al-Jazeera’s Arabic TV channel. Was she therefore targeted as a form of deterrence to other journalists? 

Callous attacks by Israeli forces on the pallbearers at Shireen's funeral as they carried her coffin out of the church added to suspicions that her killing had been intentional.

Mourners attacked at Shireen Abu Akleh's funeral, YouTube

Israel’s war on Palestinian journalists

A new report by the Mada Center (a Palestinian NGO that focuses on the right to freedom of expression) cited 15 types of punitive actions by Israel against journalists and media organizations. 

From January 2016 until May 2021, 169 journalists were detained or arrested, usually while actively filming or reporting. Many passed through Israel’s arbitrary incarceration system without ever being charged with a crime under the euphemistically-named procedure of “Administrative Detention.” In addition to conventional torture methods, such as being forced to stand or sit in uncomfortable positions for extended periods of time, the infinitely renewable term of “Administrative Detention” was itself a form of psychological torture since victims did not know when it would end. When journalists were finally released from jail, it was frequently conditional on paying heavy fines and/or submission to house arrest.

The Mada Center report noted the chilling effect of such policies - the intention of which is to deter reporting of news that may be embarrassing for Israel.

Detention was often based on spurious charges of “incitement” unrelated to the initial arrest. ​​​​Hazem Nasser, a journalist for the TV network Falastin Al-Ghad, was returning from a day’s reporting on protests in May 2021 when he was arrested and jailed for a month. There, he endured interrogation by Israeli intelligence, Shin Bet. Unable to pin any crime on his reporting, an Israeli court eventually convicted him of “incitement” for Facebook posts he had written two decades prior. 

While arrests and detentions of journalists represented 10% of the violations documented between 2016 and 2021, another 50% consisted of physical attacks such as ​​beatings and shootings.

Other attacks on Palestinian media resulted in shutting down entire organizations. For example, the radio station Al-Sanabel, which endured the arrest of several of its employees, was eventually closed down on trumped-up charges of incitement. The accusations lobbed at the station were that it had aired a speech by a Hamas official and played patriotic songs readily available on YouTube. 

Another way the Israeli occupation has tried to deter journalists has been by restricting their ability to travel abroad or by restricting their return home. Research by Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor documented cases of dozens of journalists slapped with travel bans as punishment for their work. This came on top of existing draconian rules governing Palestinians’ movement under Israeli apartheid. 

The killing of Shireen Abu Akleh is therefore symptomatic of Israel’s broader attempts to quell reporting around its decades-long military occupation. Unless an impartial investigation can trace the exact communications in the Israeli military’s chain of command before Shireen’s fatal shooting, many will reasonably conclude that she was assassinated.