Israeli government denies responsibility for the death of Shireen Abu Akleh

A veteran journalist from the Qatari network Al-Jazeera the palestinian Shireen Abu Akleh He died today of a gunshot to the head while doing his job, during a raid by the Israeli Army in the northern occupied West Bank, a death for which Israelis and Palestinians blame each other.

Both the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and the direction of Al Jazeera in Qatar have blamed the Israeli soldiers for the death of the well-known 51-year-old journalist; while the Israeli government accuses armed Palestinians of being the authors of the fatal shot.

The reactions from the Israeli Government have not been long in coming and both the Prime Minister, Naftali Benet, and the Foreign Minister, Yair Lapid, have blamed “armed Palestinians” for the death, in addition to offering the Palestinian authorities an “investigation joint pathology” to find out the origin of the lethal shot, to which they have not agreed at the moment.

“According to the information we have collected, it seems likely that armed Palestinians – who were shooting indiscriminately – were responsible for the journalist’s unfortunate death,” Benet said in a statement.

The Israeli government supports its arguments in a viralized video on social networks, supposedly from today’s raid on the Jenin refugee camp, in which Palestinians are seen shooting and bragging that they had hit a soldier.

“We hit a soldier, he’s lying on the ground,” someone is heard saying in Arabic, which according to the Israeli government is proof that the shot hit the journalist by mistake.

Benet insisted that the Israeli security forces “will continue their counter-terrorist operations to end the deadly wave of terror and restore the security of the citizens of Israel.”

Since the end of March, Israel has suffered six attacks by Palestinians or Arab-Israelis in which a total of 18 people have been killed, to which the security forces have responded by reinforcing the military presence in the occupied West Bank and carrying out numerous raids. and “counterterrorism operations.”

Many of these operations, like today’s, have taken place in the Jenin area, where a large Palestinian militia movement is concentrated and where most of the perpetrators of the recent wave of attacks came from.

Some thirty Palestinians have died during these operations in less than two months, some of them unarmed civilians with no links to Palestinian militias, and dozens have been arrested.

The Islamist Palestinian movement Hamas, which rules in Gaza, also condemned this “heinous and premeditated murder”, for which it held Israel responsible; as part of the cascade of reactions that has caused Akleh’s death.

The Arab League called for a “thorough investigation” into “the murder of the correspondent by Israeli bullets”, something that the governments of Jordan and Qatar, as well as organizations of journalists and defenders of press freedom, have also particularly demanded.

Source-larepublica.pe