Heavy clashes reported at Al Jazeera journalist’s funeral

Thousands of Palestinians said goodbye this Friday in Jerusalem to the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who died on Wednesday of a gunshot to the head during an Israeli military operation in the West Bank.

Violent incidents broke out in Jerusalem when Israeli police wanted to disperse a crowd after the reporter’s coffin was released from the hospital.

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Footage broadcast by Palestine TV shows the coffin nearly falling to the ground as policemen dispersed people waving Palestinian flags.

Later, the remains of the popular reporter for the Qatari network Al Jazeera, a 51-year-old Christian born in East Jerusalem, were taken to a church in Jerusalem, where a mass was said in her honor.

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The surrounding streets were packed with people who came to say goodbye to the journalist, who grew up in Jerusalem. The reporter will later be buried near her parents in a cemetery near the Old City.

The journalist, identified as the press and wearing a vest and helmet, was shot in the face last Wednesday while covering a raid by the Israeli Army in the Jenin refugee camp, in the occupied West Bank, where Israel has intensified its “counterterrorism” operations. ” in recent weeks with about fifty deaths.

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“On that night in question, Israeli soldiers carried out an anti-terrorist operation in the Jenin area, with the aim of arresting terror suspects. During the activity, Palestinian gunmen fired continuously and indiscriminately and threw explosives at the soldiers and military vehicles”; indicates the military report.

Israel insists that in order to determine what happened, a “professional ballistic examination” of the bullet that killed the reporter is necessary, something that is in the hands of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), who was in charge of carrying out the autopsy and has promised a “thorough and transparent” investigation into what happened.

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At the state funeral that the PNA gave Akleh in Ramallah on Thursday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas once again held Israel responsible for the death of the 51-year-old American-Palestinian journalist and promised to bring the case before the International Criminal Court. .

Israel offered to carry out a joint investigation but the ANP has refused that possibility.

“Up to this point, the PNA has not cooperated with the request to conduct a joint investigation; nor with the request to transmit the results of their investigation, or the bullet. Israel has offered that both Palestinian and American representatives be present and analyze the evidence.” professional, pathological and ballistic, as well as in the forensic examination of the bullet,” the Israeli Army stressed.

The Chief of the General Staff, Aviv Kohavi, has instructed that, after the preliminary conclusions, the investigation continue “with a commitment to transparency and disclosure of the truth of the incident, using all the tools available to the Army.”

The Israeli investigations

For its part, the Israeli army indicated this Friday that, after a preliminary investigation, it has not been able to determine who shot the Palestinian journalist for Al Jazeera, Shireen Abu Akleh.

“The conclusion of the preliminary report is that it is not possible to determine the origin of the shot that struck and killed the journalist,” the army said in a statement, raising the possibility that the shot could have come from Palestinian fighters or a Israeli soldier.

“The investigation shows two possibilities about the origin of the shot that killed her,” he says verbatim. The first is that it comes from “massive shooting by armed Palestinians [contra soldados israelíes]within the hundreds of bullets that were fired from different places”.

The text says that the Palestinian militiamen “fired hundreds of bullets from various places towards the Israeli military vehicles”, and also in the direction where Abu Akleh was located, which makes “this a possible source of the shot that hit her and killed”.

“The other option is that during the shooting one of the soldiers fired several bullets from a vehicle (…) against a terrorist who was targeting his vehicle“, adds the text.

“The Palestinian gunman fired multiple rounds at the Israeli soldier, and there is a possibility that Abu Akleh, who was close to the Palestinian gunman behind him, was hit by the soldier’s shots towards the Palestinians. The distance between the Army vehicle (from which the soldier fired) and Mrs. Abu Akleh was about 200 meters”; explains the Army in the conclusions of its internal investigation.

AFP and EFE

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