Shireen Abu Akleh
Al-jazeera war reporter who became so well-known that Israeli soldiers would mimic her sign-off
SHIREEN ABU AKLEH, who has died aged 51, was a trailblazing Al Jazeera reporter and one of the first female Arab war correspondents, who became a household name across the Middle East as “the voice of Palestine”.
She was shot in the head on May 11 at 6.30am while covering an Israeli raid on Jenin, the refugee camp in the West Bank where she had made her name 20 years earlier during the Second Intifada. She was wearing a blue protective vest marked PRESS, and was with a group of journalists.
The Israeli prime minister briefed the same day that the gunman might have been Palestinian, then subsequently conceded that the strike could also have come from an Israeli, as eyewitness evidence emerged of targeted sniper fire.
Two weeks later CNN claimed they had evidence that she had been deliberately killed by Israeli forces.
At Shireen Abu Akleh’s funeral in East Jerusalem, thousands turned out, and millions watched live on Al Jazeera as Israeli police seized the Palestinian flag from her hearse and beat mourners and pallbearers until they nearly dropped the coffin.
“I chose journalism to be close to people,” she had once said, “and I knew that it wouldn’t be easy to change the situation. But at least I managed to bring Palestinians’ voices to the world.”
Shireen Abu Akleh was born on April 3 1971 in Jerusalem to Louli and Nasri Abu Akleh in a Catholic Palestinian family of Greek Melkite origin. After the Rosary Sisters’ High School in East Jerusalem she studied Architecture at the Jordan University of Science and Technology.
But realising that she wanted to be a journalist she transferred to Yarmouk University, also in Jordan, where she graduated in print journalism, then joined UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
Before the 1993 Oslo Accords brought a fragile peace, Western news agencies had relied on the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) for information about what was going on in the occupied territories. Foreign journalists rarely ventured into the West Bank or the Gaza Strip to interview Palestinians.
In 1994, however, international money was poured into a brand-new Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation. Shireen Abu Akleh joined it and co-founded Voice of Palestine, a groundbreaking programme which allowed ordinary Palestinians to call in and have their say.
There followed spells with a satellite television channel in Amman, Jordan, and Radio Monte Carlo Moyen-orient, a French public radio station which then broadcast in Arabic. Then in 1996 she started at Al Jazeera, a year after the Qatar-based Arabic-language network was launched, as one of their first field correspondents.
By then, the Oslo Accords were coming apart and Israel was building bypass roads to cut the Palestinian population into enclaves. Palestinians lamented the lost days of freedom when they could go to the beach, or commute to East Jerusalem for cheaper groceries. Clashes between the Israeli military and the Palestinian forces – authorised by the Accords to carry arms – became frequent.
It was during the Second Intifada, the bloody Palestinian uprising that lasted from 2002 to 2007, that Shireen Abu Akleh became a noted figure. When Israeli forces attacked the Jenin refugee camp in Operation Defensive Shield, the Arab world for the first time received direct reports of the humanrights violations going on in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Israeli soldiers went around Ramallah mimicking her, shouting from a megaphone her famous closing lines: “Shireen Abu Akleh, Al Jazeera, Ramallah.”
Her steeliness was impressive. “Sometimes we stayed to sleep in hospitals, or with people we didn’t know, and despite all the dangers we continued with our journalistic work and reporting,” she recalled. “I will never forget the extent of the destruction and the feeling that death was very close. We didn’t see our homes, we took our cameras and went from place to place – through the roadblocks and winding paths.”
She went on to cover the death of Yasser Arafat, the Israel-lebanon war, wars on Gaza and Israeli incursions in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. “We never assigned Shireen to do a story, she was just there. She showed up,” said an Al Jazeera colleague.
But she was not foolhardy. “I don’t throw myself at death,” she said. “I search for a safe place to stand and how to protect my crew before worrying about the footage.”
The only thing she was afraid of was heights, which meant that she could not do live broadcasts from Al Jazeera’s eighth-floor terrace, so the crew ran a cable down to the street specially for her.
She spent a lot of time in the United States, and obtained US citizenship through family on her mother’s side in New Jersey, but she was never tempted to settle there. On her return to the Middle East, she said: “I can breathe now. Everything in the US is technical and complicated. Here life is simple. I love Palestine.”
She was a mentor to many, but in some ways unworldly. Her neighbour in Ramallah, Wessam Hammad, would often drive her to work and help her sort out her electricity bills. She adopted a Maltese dog she called Felfil and kept dozens of tins of cat food under her desk so she could feed starving strays, even though she was allergic. If she had not been a journalist, she once said, she would have run an animal shelter.
She is survived by her brother, Tony Abu Akleh.
Shireen Abu Akleh, born April 3 1971, died May 11 2022