Last month, Israeli soldiers shot and killed Shireen Abu Akleh, an American-Palestinian journalist, while she was reporting for Al Jazeera on an Israeli military operation in the West Bank city of Jenin. She was wearing a helmet and vest clearly marked “PRESS.”
Following Abu Akleh’s death, Israeli officials — after changing their official narrative and backtracking on their original claims that unidentified Palestinian militants had killed her — announced that they would not investigate the circumstances around her murder.
This decision is part of a longstanding pattern: Israeli forces have routinely targeted journalists — Palestinian journalists, in particular — and have bombed media offices, including the bureaus of Al Jazeera and the Associated Press in May 2021. And yet, despite all of this, there is little evidence that the Israeli government or its military have taken any steps to meaningfully investigate or stop these attacks.
