Documentary identifies the Israeli soldier as a shooter of the Palestinian American journalist

When Shireen Abu Akleh, a renowned Palestinian American broadcaster, was shot and killed In 2022, in the northern West Bank, Israeli officials initially suggested that she may have been hit by a Palestinian militant. Months later, the army changed its account and acknowledged that she was most likely shot by an Israeli soldier – who refused to identify it.

Three years later, a new documentary has identified and mentioned an Israeli soldier as the shooter, who apparently resolve a mystery that was an important focus at the time of the incident.

Zeteo News, a left -leaning online news exit, called the shooter as a capt. Alon Scagio, then a 20-year-old sniper in an elite command unit, referring to another soldier in his team.

Two Israeli military officials, who talk about the state of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue, confirmed the conclusions of the documentary to the New York Times. Asked by the time to confirm the identity of the soldier, the Israeli army said that “the” not definitive determination had brought with regard to the identity of the person responsible for the shooting. ” At the same time, it was a message from the Scagio family asking that journalists avoid the name of the captain.

Mrs. Abu Akleh, an experienced reporter for Al Jazeera, was a household name in the East. Her death left mourning in the region and led to greater global control of the occupation of the West Bank of Israel. Her American citizenship also led to unusual concern of the Biden government, which led to friction between American and Israeli governments.

By one biography Captain Scagio, posted on the website of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, was a career -soldier who trained as an elite sneaker and fought for eight months in the West Bank in 2022. Later he served in Gaza, after Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023, before he was returned to the West Banker, the biography said.

Captain Scagio was killed in the city of Jenin last June, 22 years old, after his convoy was hit by an explosive along the road, the biography said.

The documentary Van ZeTeo concluded that Kapitein Scagio had shot at Mrs. Abu Akleh more than two years earlier in the same city. She had covered an Israeli military raid and collisions between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants. The Zeteo team was led by a former Wall Street Journal Correspondent, Dion Nissenbaum, and included a regular freelance contribution to the New York Times, Fatima Abdulkarim.

Wearing protective equipment marked with the word ‘press’, Mrs. Abu Akleh was hit while walking with a group of similar dressed journalists in the direction of a small convoy of Israeli military jeeps. An investigation through time In 2022 it discovered that the bullet that Mrs. Abu Akleh killed was fired from the estimated location of the Israeli military convoy, most likely by a soldier of an elite unit.

The evidence assessed by the Times showed that there were no armed Palestinians nearby when she was shot. It contradicted Israeli that if a soldier had wrongly killed her, it was because he had shot a Palestinian shooter.

As an American citizen, the murder of Mrs. Abu Akleh has encouraged the Biden government to encourage Israel to investigate her death more rigorously. Later was the Biden administration itself accused from the trivialization of Israeli culpability, an indictment was fired by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which Closed That although Israeli soldiers may have killed the journalist, they have not intentionally aimed her.

The Zeteo documentary, with reference to an anonymous source, said that American officials had initially decided after a site visit that Mrs. Abu Akleh was deliberately focused before they changed their conclusions in the final version of the report to avoid Israel.

A high American officer who is familiar with the report said that the conclusions had never changed and no draft version had ever concluded that Mrs. Abu Akleh had been deliberately killed. The civil servant also said that the American officers who visited the location of the shooting could not come to a definitive conclusion about the exact face of the soldier, let alone the shooter’s intention, because the Americans did not judge the site from an Israeli military vehicle.

The Times research was also unable to determine the exact field of vision or the intention of the shooter.

The office of the security coordinator – the unit of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that investigated the incident – refused to comment.

The funeral of Mrs. Abu Akleh made protest worldwide after Israeli police officers attacked Mourners who wear her coffin, causing them to drop it.

Natan Odenheimer and Ronen Bergman contributed to reporting.