If you ask me how I feel a year after Shireen Abu Akleh’s assassination, I would tell you that I feel angry because both Shireen and I died under the tree that day. Shireen awaits justice from heaven, while I wait for it down here on earth.
New analysis by Forensic Architecture and Al Haq shows Shireen Abu Akleh was “deliberately and repeatedly targeted” by an Israeli military sniper taking “precise and careful aim.” These findings were disclosed today following the submission of a complaint to the ICC by lawyers for the family of Abu Akleh and two Palestinian journalists standing beside her that day.
In the weeks after Shireen was killed, and in the face of countless efforts to discredit them, their experience, and their testimonies, these journalists persevered. Amidst all the trauma and grief they were experiencing, from losing a hero and friend, they chose to speak up, and continued telling the truth.
Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing exemplifies the inextricable tangling of witness and attempted erasure—of martyrdom in the wholest sense—in occupied Palestine.
The Biden administration says it is shocked by Shireen Abu Akleh’s death, and wants an investigation. But they’re not going to launch their own, and they will presumably be skeptical of any outside human rights group that does. They have confidence in Israel to investigate itself, but it will take them months, possibly years, to develop a position on its findings. A special relationship indeed.