Published: 12 May 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
A year after the death of Al-Jazeera’s Shireen Abu Akleh, the Committee to Protect Journalists has released a report accusing Israeli officials of 20-year failure.
Israel's systematic failure to hold anybody accountable for the killing of 20 Palestinian and foreign journalists since 2001 has a "chilling effect" on the freedom of press, a new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists found on Tuesday.
Commissioned for the one-year anniversary of the killing of the Palestinian Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli forces in the West Bank city of Jenin, the special report concludes that Israel consistently evades accountability and provides Palestinians with no recourse to justice.
The report also decries the destruction of media infrastructure – like the 2021 bombing of the Gaza tower that housed dozens of media outlets including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera – restrictions on the work of Palestinian journalists, and even post-hoc justifications for killings by dubbing them "terrorists."
Sixteen of the 20 journalists were killed by Israel, two who were killed by gunmen in Palestinian Presidential Guard uniform, and two in more complex circumstances.
The report also notes that 13 out of the 20 journalists who were killed were clearly marked as press at the time of their deaths. Reuters camera operator Fadel Shana, for example, was wearing a press vest and stood next to a vehicle marked with the words "TV".
"There is no policy document describing the process in detail and the results of any probe are confidential," the non-governmental organisation found, adding that only once did they open a criminal investigation into a killing.
The report urges Israel to open an independent, transparent criminal investigations into the killing of Abu Akleh, as well into the cases of Ahmed Abu Hussein and Yaser Murtaja, who were killed during the Great March of Return at Israel's border in 2018.
