Shireen Abu Akleh

Abu Akleh was born into a Christian Palestinian family in Jerusalem. Her father, Nasri Abu Akleh, was from a Greek Melkite family in nearby Bethlehem, while her mother, Louli (née Zakaria) Abu Akleh, belonged to a Greek Orthodox family from Jerusalem. Abu Akleh never married, but she remained close to her brother, Anton (“Tony”) Abu Akleh, and his children, who referred to her as a “second mom.”

Born four years after East Jerusalem was occupied by Israel in the Six-Day War (1967), Abu Akleh belonged to an uncertain generation of Jerusalemites. Jordan still claimed sovereignty over East Jerusalem, and most of its residents found it more beneficial to retain Jordanian passports than to apply for the rights and protections of Israeli citizenship. The arrangement of permanent resident status while holding Jordanian passports allowed Palestinian Jerusalemites to remain connected to their families, and to Palestinian society more broadly, without losing their homes or their neighbourhoods. But it also made them vulnerable to the possibility that their residency could be revoked at any time. They were also left with a limited voice in policy making that affected their neighbourhoods.

For a period of Abu Akleh’s childhood, she lived with relatives in New Jersey. She obtained American citizenship and visited the United States with some frequency, but she continued to reside in Jerusalem in her childhood neighbourhood of Beit Hanina.

Abu Akleh went to Jordan in 1987 to study architecture at the Jordan University of Science and Technology. In December of that year, the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, broke out after years of mounting frustration toward Israeli policies. Eager to get the Palestinians’ story out to the world, Abu Akleh eventually decided to transfer to nearby Yarmouk University to study journalism. In a clip broadcast on Al Jazeera in the months before her death, she told viewers: “I chose journalism to be close to the people. It might not be easy to change the reality, but at least I could bring their voice to the world.”

After graduating, Abu Akleh worked a brief stint at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The start of her journalistic career coincided with the Oslo Accords (1993), a bilateral peace agreement between the government of Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) that arranged for Palestinian self-governance in exchange for peace. With a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict achieving international legitimacy, a new Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation was established with international funding in 1994. Through it, a new radio station was established called the Voice of Palestine, in which Abu Akleh played a foundational role. Her early career also included gigs at Amman Satellite Channel and Radio Monte Carlo Moyen-Orient.

In 1997 Abu Akleh joined Al Jazeera, an Arabic-language cable television news network that had been founded one year earlier by the Qatari emir. As a field correspondent, she provided an international audience with insight directly from inside the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She rose to prominence with the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000, as Palestinians and Arabs worldwide gathered around their television sets for the latest updates on the violence. Abu Akleh’s residency in Jerusalem, moreover, gave her the ability to report to the Arab world from within Israel, including during the Lebanon War in 2006. Although she often reported in tense and dangerous situations, she remained composed, collected, and focused on explaining the situation around her in a calm and articulate manner. In a reflection of her reputable reporting during the intifada, soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reportedly mimicked her over a loudspeaker during the IDF’s 2002 siege of Ramallah: “Curfew is declared, Shireen Abu Akleh, Al Jazeera.”

Apart from her work for Al Jazeera, Abu Akleh helped train students in journalism in the West Bank. She worked at Birzeit University’s Media Development Center near Ramallah and taught media courses at the university. But she also remained cognizant that even established journalists must keep up with the ever-transforming landscape of their field: in 2020 she completed a program in digital journalism at the university.

In early 2022 the West Bank began seeing its worst cycle of violence since the second intifada ended in 2005. Abu Akleh was reporting from Jenin on May 11 as the IDF was conducting a raid in the town. Despite wearing protective gear and a vest that prominently displayed the word “PRESS,” she was shot in the head. Israeli officials initially indicated that she was caught in the firefight and was killed by a Palestinian gunman. But independent investigations corroborated Al Jazeera’s claims that she was shot by an IDF soldier and that no Palestinian gunmen were in her vicinity. Under international pressure, the IDF later backtracked and acknowledged that the bullet that killed Abu Akleh likely came from one of its soldiers, but no disciplinary actions were taken.

Abu Akleh’s funeral took place on May 13 in the eastern part of Jerusalem. It drew hundreds of mourners bearing Palestinian flags and chanting slogans of Palestinian national solidarity. Israeli police intervened to prevent the mourners from processing with her coffin on foot from a morgue in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood to the Cathedral of the Annunciation in Jerusalem’s Old City, where funeral rites were to be held. In the ensuing confrontation, pallbearers briefly lost control of the coffin, the lower end of which nearly fell to the ground. Abu Akleh was laid to rest later that day in a cemetery on Mount Zion, near the burial sites of her father, mother, and maternal grandfather.