New York: UN experts determined that the journalist for the Qatari channel Al Jazeera Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by a shot by Israeli forces, according to the statement published this Friday by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
“All the information we have obtained, including official information from the Israeli Army and the Palestinian Attorney General, is consistent with the conclusion that the shots that killed Abu Akleh and wounded his colleague Ali Samoudi came from the Israeli Security Forces and not from indiscriminate shooting by armed Palestinians, as the Israeli authorities initially claimed,” the text states.
The experts stressed that they found no information that “suggests that there was activity by armed Palestinians in the vicinity of the journalists.”
In this context, the agency urged the Israeli authorities to “open a criminal investigation into the murder of Abu Akleh and into all other killings and serious injuries committed by Israeli forces in the West Bank.”
Shireen Abu Akleh was shot to death on May 11 while she was covering an Israeli raid on a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin. Another Palestinian journalist named Ali Samoudi who works for the Jerusalem-based Quds newspaper was also shot in the back.