A photo of Shireen Abu Akleh during a sit-in in front of the Israeli Embassy in Athens, on May 16, 2022. (Credit: Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP)
A new documentary, released Thursday by Zeteo, an independent American media outlet, claims to have identified the Israeli soldier who allegedly shot al-Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022 in the occupied West Bank, where she was killed while reporting in Jenin.
Abu Akleh was a Palestinian-American journalist who had worked for al-Jazeera since 1997, according to the Qatari channel. Initially blaming Palestinian fighters for the shooting, the Israeli army later acknowledged a “high probability” that its forces had “accidentally” killed the journalist.
Zeteo, based in Washington, was founded by journalist Mehdi Hassan. It is dedicated, according to its website, to in-depth investigative journalism without corporate funding or sponsors, relying on contributions from its subscribers to finance its projects.
'It wasn't a problem for him'
According to the outlet, the soldier accused of killing the journalist was Alan Scagio, a sniper from the Israeli army’s Duvdevan unit, who was killed in June 2024 by an improvised roadside bomb in Jenin. In the film, a friend claimed that the shooter “was not tormented” by the death of Abu Akleh.
“It wasn't a problem for him, but he was not proud of it either,” the friend stated, while also noting that since then, the Duvdevan unit “uses the journalist's image as a target during shooting exercises.”
According to the investigators who made the documentary, the soldier was subsequently transferred to another unit, to a command position, “to distance him from the investigation” into the shooting.
The documentary also pointed out that the Biden administration, based on numerous testimonies, “knew or suspected” that the journalist was killed by an Israeli soldier, but continued to support Israeli versions citing Palestinian fighters’ involvement, then accidental shooting. Washington reportedly also “refused to put pressure” on Israel over this matter, “to avoid angering the Israeli government.”
Impunity
This American stance and the impunity following the murder of Abu Akleh allegedly “contributed to the deaths of other Americans and other civilians,” according to U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen, interviewed in the documentary.
The journalist's death occurred during a period of escalating Israeli raids in the West Bank in 2022, which resulted in dozens of deaths. Since then, and amid a violent Israeli offensive on Gaza, violence has increased in the West Bank, where Israel launched a broad operation last January, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians, notably from the Jenin camp. Already, since the start of the war on Oct. 7, 2023, triggered by the bloody attack by the Hamas movement against Israel, the West Bank has been plagued by violence. Since that date, at least 925 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers, according to figures from the Palestinian Health Ministry. At the same time, at least 33 Israelis, including soldiers, have been killed in the West Bank in Palestinian attacks or during military operations, according to official Israeli data.