It was an area of tension as she used to cover. Wednesday morning, his helmet on his head and his « Press » vest on his back, Shireen Abu Akleh left for Jenin, a large city in the north of the occupied West Bank, where the Israeli army has been carrying out military operations for several weeks. It is barely 6:13 a.m. when the journalist sends a message to her editorial office, the Al-Jazeera channel. “Israeli forces are invading Jenin and surrounding a house in the Jaberiyat neighborhood. I’m on my way, I’ll let you know for a live as soon as I have more details. This email will be the last the 51-year-old Palestinian-American reporter will write to the channel.
She will be declared dead, an hour later at the city hospital, after being hit in the head by a bullet received during her report. Where is the shot coming from? After claiming that the journalist had “probably” succumbed to an attack carried out by Palestinian fighters, Israel finally said that it did not rule out the possibility that the bullet was fired by its soldiers. Since then, tributes to this figure of Al-Jazeera, renowned for his courage and tenacity on the ground, have continued to multiply.
“An Icon of Truth”
Several officials and thousands of Palestinians participated in an official ceremony in Ramallah on Thursday, saluting the memory of the reporter killed at 51 for the last time. She was the « voice of Palestine », hailed the Palestinian Foreign Ministry, referring to an « icon of truth » and « a national heroine for those whose voices had been silenced by Israel’s crimes ».
“I chose this path to be close to people”
When she was younger, Shireen Abu Akleh was not destined for a career as a reporter. Architecture was his first ambition. Born in 1971 into a Christian family, Shireen grew up in the town of Beit Hanina, in East Jerusalem. At the same time, she will obtain American nationality, after having lived for a while alongside her mother’s family, settled in New Jersey. Later, she began studying architecture at the Jordanian University, before finally turning to journalism by joining the faculty of Yarmouk in Jordan, specifies the Israeli daily Haaretz. “I chose this path to be close to people,” she explained in a short video shared by Al-Jazeera, after her death on Wednesday.
With her diploma in hand, the apprentice journalist returns to Palestinian land, wanting to tell the daily life and the difficulties of a people she considers unfairly threatened. She knocked on the door of several newsrooms, multiplied the freelances for the radio « La Voix de la Palestine » and the radio Monte-Carlo, before joining the Al-Jazeera channel in 1997, where she worked for 25 years. Her passion for the field pushes her to cover multiple events from Gaza to Ramallah, via Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Facing the camera, she recounts the violence of the Battle of Jenin (2002) or the wounded of the second Intifada (2000-2005). More recently, she described the scale of the raids carried out by the Israeli army in the region.
A face that imposes itself in Arab homes
Asked four years ago by the NBC channel, about her apprehension of the field, the reporter confided that she was « obviously afraid ». « But sometimes it’s not the time to be afraid when you do this job, » she continued. “I try to report from relatively safe places, it is important for me to protect my team as much as possible,” she told television.
On the ground, his reports attempt to describe both the policy of the State of Israel, the violence of its army, and the failings of the Palestinian Authority. Little by little, his face is imposing itself in thousands of Arab homes, becoming a Palestinian icon, inspiring a whole generation of aspiring journalists. « I know a lot of little girls who grew up standing in front of their mirror, hairbrush in hand, pretending to be Shireen, » Dalia Hatuqa, a Palestinian-American journalist and journalist, told The New York Times. former friend of Abu Akleh. “That’s how enduring and important his presence was. »