When Shireen Abu Akleh, a renowned Palestinian broadcaster, was shot in 2022 in northern West Bank, Israeli officials initially suggested that she had perhaps been struck by a Palestinian activist. Months later, the army changed its account, acknowledging that it was probably killed by an Israeli soldier – which he refused to identify.
Three years later, a new documentary identified and appointed an Israeli soldier as the shooter, apparently resolving a mystery which was a major objective at the time of the incident.
Zeteo News, a left online media, appointed the shooter like Captain Alon Scagio, then a 20 -year -old sniper in an elite commando unit, citing another soldier in his team.
Two Israeli military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue, confirmed the conclusions of the documentary to the New York Times. Questioned by the Times to confirm the identity of the soldier, the Israeli army said that it had “no final determination concerning the identity of the individual responsible for the shooting”. At the same time, he sent a message from the Scagio family asking journalists to avoid publishing the name of the captain.
Ms. Abu Akleh, a veteran journalist from Al Jazeera, was a familiar name in the Middle East. His death sparked mourning through the region and caused a global examination of a greater opportunity to occupy Israel in the West Bank. His American citizenship has also aroused unusual concern on the part of the Biden administration, leading to the friction between the American and Israeli governments.
According to a biography published on the website of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, Captain Scagio was a career soldier who trained as a sniper and fought in the West Bank for eight months in 2022. Later, he served in Gaza, after the attack on Hamas against Israel in October 2023, before being transferred to the West Bank, indicated the biography.
Captain Scagio was killed in the city of Jenin of the West West Bank in June in June, 22 years, after his convoy was struck by an explosive on the roadside, the biography said.
Zeteo’s documentary concluded that Captain Scagio had shot Ms. Abu Akleh in the same city more than two years earlier. It covered an Israeli military raid and clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian activists. The Zeteo team was led by a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Dion Nissenbaum, and included a regular independent contributor to the New York Times, Fatima Abdulkarim.
Bearing protective equipment marked with the word “press”, Ms. Abu Akleh was struck by walking with a group of journalists dressed in the same way towards a small convoy of Israeli military jeeps. A Times investigation in 2022 revealed that the ball that killed Ms. Abu Akleh was taken from the approximate location of the Israeli military convoy, most likely by a soldier of an elite unit.
The evidence examined by the Times showed that there were no armed Palestinians near her when she was shot. This contradicted the Israeli statements that, if a soldier had mistakenly killed her, it was because he had shot a Palestinian shooter.
As an American citizen, the murder of Ms. Abu Akleh prompted the Biden administration to push Israel to investigate his death more rigorously. Later, the Biden administration itself was accused of minimizing Israeli guilt, an accusation rejected by the State Department, which concluded that even if Israeli soldiers were able to kill the journalist, they did not intentionally target it.
The documentary Zeteo, citing an anonymous source, said that US officials had initially decided after a site visit that Ms. Abu Akleh had been deliberately targeted, before changing their conclusions in the final version of the report to avoid upset Israel.
A senior American official familiar with the report indicated that his conclusions had never been modified and that no project version had never concluded that Ms. Abu Akleh had been intentionally killed. The official also said that the American officers who visited the shooting site could not reach a final conclusion on the soldier’s exact line of view, not to mention the shooter’s intention, because the Americans did not evaluate the site from an Israeli military vehicle.
Times’ survey was also unable to determine the shooter’s field of vision or intention of the shooter.
The office of the Security Coordinator – The State Department Unit which investigated the incident – refused to comment.
The funeral of Ms. Abu Akleh attracted the global outcry after Israeli police attacked people in mourning carrying his coffin, bringing them down.
Natan Odenheimer and Ronen Bergman contributed the reports.
