Guilty, Never Innocent, No Evidence Required

"As part of the activity in the Jenin refugee camp, suspects fired heavily at the force and threw explosives. The force responded by firing. Hits were detected."

"The possibility that journalists were hit, possibly by Palestinian gunfire, is being investigated. The event is being examined."

IDF statement

 

"Palestinians fired extensively at our forces, firing wildly and indiscriminately in every direction. Unlike the Palestinians, IDF soldiers carry out professional and selective firing ... at this stage it is not possible to determine from which shot she was hit."

"[A special team would be investigating the incident]."

 IDF Chief of Staff, Major General Aviv Kochavi  

Picture of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, killed by gunfire during an Israeli raid, May 11, 2022. (credit: REUTERS/IMAD CREIDI)

“Our initial findings from our investigation cannot determine which gunfire hit Shireen and I cannot exclude anything because of the chaos on the ground."

"I hope to get full cooperation from the Palestinians because without the pathological findings and the forensic findings it will be very hard to understand what happened."

"I have 40 years of experience and I know that it takes time to figure out exactly what happened, and we are trying to figure out exactly what happened. It can be that the Palestinians shot her, tragically it can be on our side and we are investigating it."

"[Israel is] committed to finding out the truth."
Israeli Minister of Defence Benny Gantz

 

"They cannot hide the truth with this crime."

"They are the ones who committed the crime, and because we do not trust them, we will immediately go to the International Criminal Court."

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas

In the past month an acceleration of  attacks by Palestinians took place in Israel against Jewish citizens, killing eighteen people in total, by knife, gun and car rammings. A number of attackers came from the West Bank village of Jenin, a frequent source of such attackers and Israeli security revealed that additional attacks were being planned from that source. The decision was made by the IDF to conduct a raid in Jenin to arrest that possibility.

During that raid there ensued a gun battle with armed Palestinian militants. An Al Jazeera news-gathering crew was on site and among them a veteran reporter for the Qatar-based news group, a familiar face to Palestinians as a defender of their victimhood rights against the 'occupation'. The West Bank, formerly ancestral Judaean heritage land, now a Palestinian-state-in-waiting is governed by the Palestinian Authority, the Gaza Strip, more Judaean heritage land, by Hamas.

Fatah (Palestinian Authority) and Hamas share a goal; the destruction of Israel. Each government-in-waiting incites its Palestinian citizens to violence against Israel, rewarding those who commit violence against Israel and its Jewish citizens. Hamas makes no pretense of ever recognizing the legitimacy of the Jewish state, opting instead to its destruction, while Fatah speaks peace in English and war in Arabic.

Both employ the victimhood card of Palestinian defencelessness against purported Israeli human rights offences and brutality against Palestinians, declaring Israel an apartheid state. In that 'apartheid state' live several million Palestinian Arabs with full citizenship, representation in the Knesset, the freedom of Palestinians to practise as physicians, lawyers, justices, diplomats in Israel. No Jews are permitted to live in land governed by the PA and Hamas.

The countless human rights infractions that Israeli Jews suffer include the refusal by Jordan's Islamic Waqf to permit Jews to worship at the site of the Temple Mount, a site sacred to Judaism, the location of the two iterations of the Temple of Solomon, destroyed the second time by Rome, over which ruins sit Muslim sites, given primacy over the original Judaic structures. Violence takes place on those occasions when Jews venture on the Temple Mount, by rioting Palestinians.

The Palestinians refused in 1948 to accept the Partition Plan proffered by the United Nations that would give Jews their state, Palestinians one of their own. They preferred to sit back until the combined Arab armies destroyed the nascent Jewish state when they would return and claim the entire territory. Successive offers for peace and side-by-side states on Israel's part have all been refused by the Palestinian leaders over the years.

And over those years the Palestinians who took the name Palestinians and Palestine from the indigenous Jews, as well as their most religiously sacred sites as their own, took pains to slander Jews and Israel in every international forum they could find sympathizers within, from the United Nations to the European Union. The UN has effectively granted them the status of refugees-for-life with each successive generation joining the refugee file.

The demonization of Israel has been so complete and so completely successful over the years that every and any time the Palestinians and their supporters accuse Israel of criminal human rights abuses against the Palestinians, there is no evidence required, all is accepted as truth by a credulous public for whom antisemitism is a normal expression of society. 

This general acceptance in the wider world community as reflected in international media, all assuming that the Palestinian version of a Palestinian reporter's death in the melee of a gunfight between IDF troops and Palestinian gunmen (eg terrorists) is simply yet another manifestation of the glowering hatefest against Jews promoted by Palestinians and taken up with alacrity by global communities finding more in common with the concept of a beleaguered self-identified victim than a nation attempting to protect itself and its citizens from ongoing lethal violence.

"According to the information we've gathered, it appears likely that armed Palestinians -- who were indiscriminately firing at the time -- were responsible for the unfortunate death of the journalist", Israel's Prime Minister Naftali Bennett stated following the death of the journalist -- one of many deaths over the years of Al Jazeera reporters, none of which have ever engendered this level of enquiry.

 

A video was released by Israeli officials (IDF and Ministry of Foreign Affairs) showing a man firing down an alley and people running about at the time of the shooting in the Jenin Refugee Camp, shouting that a soldier had been shot. "No IDF soldier was injured, which increases the possibility that Palestinian terrorists were the ones who shot the journalist", said Mr. Bennett.

 

This, along with an initial autopsy of the journalist's body by Palestinian coroners who stated she had died when a bullet fired from several meters' distance struck her head. Dr. Ryan al-Ali of the Pathological Institute at the a-Najah University in Nablus was quoted as having said they could not determine who had shot her. As a Palestinian medical examiner, he did not echo the accusation levelled by the PA's Abbas, declining to comment on who might have fired the round, after The West Bank autopsy was concluded.