A retired US Army colonel who was involved in the investigation into the Israeli military killing of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh has revealed that he found the shooting was intentional shortly after she was killed.
Abu Akleh, a veteran Al Jazeera reporter and a Christian, was killed by the Israeli military while reporting on an IDF raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on May 11, 2022. She was shot in the head while wearing a vest clearly marked with the word “PRESS.”
“My findings were beyond a reasonable doubt that this was an intentional killing of Shireen Abu Akleh,” Col. Steve Gabavics told Zeteo reporter Mehdi Hasan. Gabavics affirmed that he came to the conclusion within 10 days of Abu Akleh’s killing.
Despite Gabavics’ findings, the Biden administration’s State Department claimed in a statement issued on July 4, 2022, that the shooting was unintentional and the result of “tragic circumstances.”
Gabavics told Hasan that his boss at the time, Lt. Gen. Michael R. Fenzel, who led the US Security Coordinator liaison office for Israel, took the word of an Israeli general over his findings. Gabavics said that Gen. Yehuda Fox, the head of Israel’s Central Command at the time, told Fenzel that an Israeli soldier may have killed Abu Akleh, but that it was an “accident, that it was a matter of tragic circumstances,” the same language used in the Biden administration’s statement.
“So the US general takes the word of a foreign general over his own officer, who he sent to investigate?” Hasan asked Gabavics, to which he answered in the affirmative.
Gabavics first shared his story as an anonymous source for a Zeteo documentary titled “Who Killed Shireen?” He revealed his identity in an interview with The New York Times on Monday and said he came forward because of his frustration with the case.
The retired US colonel, who was a career military policeman and served 30 years, told the Times that he and his colleagues were “flabbergasted” by the Biden administration’s statement on Abu Akhleh’s killing and the fact that the State Department avoided calling it intentional “continued to be on my conscience nonstop.”
“The favoritism is always toward the Israelis. Very little of that goes to the Palestinians,” Gabavics said.
