Video Shared by Israel Shows Palestinian Gunman Was Not Firing at Journalist Killed During Israeli Raid

An effort by Israeli officials to use social media evidence to blame Palestinian militants for the fatal shooting of a journalist in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday unraveled within hours, as a close analysis of video shared by Israel showed that a Palestinian gunman was shooting in the direction of Israeli soldiers, not the reporter.

Immediately after the tragic killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, a renowned Palestinian American journalist who was gunned down while covering an Israeli raid on a refugee camp in Jenin, three other journalists who were with her, including one colleague who was shot and another who tried to save her, said that the group had come under fire from Israeli soldiers.

In response, a chorus of senior Israeli officials insisted that it was “likely” the reporter had been killed by Palestinian militants, who exchanged fire with Israeli soldiers during the raid.

To support that case, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and the Israeli Embassy in Washington all shared video on social networks that showed a Palestinian gunman opening fire during the raid.

The edited and subtitled video, which was originally released by Palestinian militants, included a comment from an unseen person who said, in Arabic, that the militants had shot a soldier who was “laying on the ground.”

Israeli officials called this evidence that the Palestinian militants might have mistaken Abu Akleh, a well-known correspondent for Al Jazeera who was wearing a blue helmet and flak jacket labeled “press,” for an Israeli soldier.

However, an investigation of the video by a local researcher for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem showed that the militant had been firing down an alley in the densely populated refugee camp that was nowhere near the entrance to the camp where Abu Akleh and other journalists had been pinned down by gunfire.

Working with visual clues from the harrowing video of Abu Akleh’s colleagues and bystanders attempting to rescue her, and a tip from an Agence France-Presse correspondent on the scene, geolocation experts confirmed that the Al Jazeera correspondent was at the edge of the camp, about a six-minute walk from where the militant was recorded firing down an alley.

As the Al Jazeera English producer Linah Alsaafin noted, video clip of the effort to rescue Abu Akleh seemed to show that anyone who approached her was fired on, which suggests that the group of journalists was under deliberate attack and not just subject to indiscriminate fire.

Later on Wednesday, after the B’Tselem investigation showed that the bullets fired by the Palestinian militant in the video Israel circulated could not have struck Abu Akleh, the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Gen. Aviv Kochavi, said in a statement that it was not yet possible to be sure who had shot Abu Akleh, expressed regret for her death, and ordered an investigation. That, several activists noted, was quite different from an earlier statement from an Israeli military spokesperson who said that the journalists who were shot had been “armed with cameras.”

The Israeli army also released body camera footage shot during the raid to illustrate that its forces had come under fire from Palestinian militants in the camp.

Remarkably, several visual clues in the Israeli military’s video exactly match the path shown in the video recorded by the B’Tselem researcher, which seems to prove that Israeli soldiers were at the end of the alley the Palestinian militant was filmed firing down and then emerged onto the very same street that Abu Akleh was at the end of when she was shot.