End US funding of Israeli army

WE, the International Communities, strongly condemn the senseless killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, a correspondent for Al Jazeera.

We are deeply saddened by this news and we would like to champion our South African leadership to make a statement on the news of Shireen.

She dedicated her life to exposing Israeli military violence – and it is ultimately what killed her. And she did all of this in an incredibly hostile, biased, dishonest media landscape that reports Israel’s lies as facts and erases Palestinians’ truths, including the truth of her own killing.

Israeli and Western media must face facts. Multiple eyewitness accounts tell us that an Israeli sniper directly targeted Shireen while she was covering an Israeli military raid in Jenin, a Palestinian

refugee camp. She was wearing a press vest and a helmet, and the sniper shot her with extreme precision, near her ear, where the helmet didn’t cover. This was a targeted assassination.

The sniper’s murder of Shireen is part of a larger pattern of Israel eliminating Palestinian journalists, the people who expose Israel’s crimes to the world. Since 2000, the Israeli military has murdered 55 Palestinian journalists. We call for justice for Shireen, as we do with all murdered Palestinians, by demanding the US government end its $3.8 billion in annual funding to the Israeli military. As Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib tweeted: “@POTUS, whether you’re Palestinian, American or not, being killed with US funding must stop.”

SAMAOEN OSMAN |