Nasser Abu Bakr, the head of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, the former president of the International Federation of Journalists current member of its administrative board, Jimmy Boumleiha, and Anton Abu Akleh, brother of the slain Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, submitted on Tuesday a new legal complaint to the office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Dutch city of The Hague on the Israeli army killing of Shireen Abu Akleh.
This screenshot shows a view of the site where Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh was killed amid a gun battle between occupation troops and Palestinian gunmen in Jenin in May, in a video published by Al-Haq and Forensic Architecture on September 20, 2022. (Screenshot: YouTube)
Abu Akleh, who was with Al Jazeera for 25 years was shot in the head and killed by Israeli forces on May 11 while she was covering an army raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. She was wearing a flak jacket and helmet that clearly identified her as a member of the press. Al Jazeera producer Ali al-Samoudi, who was standing near her along with a group of Palestinian journalists, was also shot in the back but recovered.
Speaking in front of the ICC in The Hague, Netherlands, on Tuesday, Abu Akleh’s brother Anton said that they would do whatever was necessary to ensure accountability for her killing. “Like we said before, and like other reports said previously, there were more than 16 shots fired towards Shireen and the media and her colleagues who were standing in that ally,” said. “They even targeted the person who was trying to pull her into safety after she was shot down.”
A Palestinian human rights group, Al-Haq, and a London-based research firm on Tuesday published a new report they said showed Abu Akleh was intentionally targeted by Israeli troops in May. Al-Haq had its offices in Ramallah shuttered by Israel last month.
The probe of the deadly shooting was carried out by the Al-Haq rights group alongside Forensic Architecture, a research group based at the University of London that uses architectural technologies to investigate human rights violations. Forensic Architecture and Al-Haq said they employed a precise digital reconstruction of the deadly shooting, including using drone videos, photographs of the site, and a telephoto camera lens to simulate the view of the Israeli soldier’s 4x scope.
The new report said it used previously unseen footage and advanced spatial and audio analysis to determine that Abu Akleh was “explicitly targeted by Israeli troops.”
The full Forensic Architecture report:
Related: https://maki.org.il/en/?p=30555
