DPA
TEL AVIV
The Al Jazeera media network said on Tuesday it was referring the killing in May of its television journalist Shireen Abu Akleh to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.
Al Jazeera’s legal team had conducted “a full and detailed investigation into the case and unearthed new evidence based on several eyewitness accounts, the examination of multiple items of video footage, and forensic evidence pertaining to the case,” the network said.
The new evidence “clearly show that Shireen and her colleagues were directly fired at by the Israeli Occupation Forces,” it said. Al Jazeera rejected the claim by the Israeli authorities that the shooting had been a mistake during an exchange of fire in Jenin in the northern West Bank.
Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid tweeted: “No one will conduct investigations into Israeli soldiers, and no one can instruct us about morality in waging war, certainly not Al Jazeera.” Israel does not recognize the ICC and has refused to cooperate with it in the past.
The shooting on May 11 generated international concern. Abu Akleh, 51, who held US citizenship as well as Palestinian, was shot while wearing a vest and helmet clearly indicating that she was from the press. According to the Israeli army, there had been a firefight with dozens of Palestinian militants directly before the shooting, but the Palestinian state prosecutor’s office has accused the soldiers of deliberately firing on the journalist.
An Israeli military investigation reached the conclusion that the origin of the fatal shots could not be definitively identified, but that they had “very likely” been fired in error by an Israeli soldier.
The United States launched an investigation into the killing in the middle of last month.
At the time, Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz called the US Justice Department probe “a mistake,” saying that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had conducted a full investigation.
“I have delivered a message to US representatives that we stand by the IDF’s soldiers, that we will not cooperate with an external investigation, and will not enable intervention to internal investigations,” Gantz tweeted.
