Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) urged the White House on Monday to make a report investigating the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh public.
The Democratic senator said that he had reviewed the report conducted by the U.S. Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority (weeks after he requested it from the State Department), and now he wants it entirely declassified.
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“I strongly believe that its public release is vital to ensuring transparency and accountability in the shooting death of American citizen and journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and to avoiding future preventable and wrongful deaths — goals we should all support,” Van Hollen said in a statement, per Al Jazeera, the outlet where Abu Akleh worked.
Abu Akleh was killed in a shooting on May 11, 2022, while covering an Israeli raid in the West Bank city of Jenin. The State Department investigated the veteran journalist’s death, finding that, while it could not definitively determine who fired the shot that killed her, it was likely from Israeli gunfire.
Israeli and Palestinian leaders immediately blamed each other.
Israeli authorities initially claimed that Palestinian gunmen were behind the shooting but later backtracked the claim and said they could not rule out the possibility that an Israeli soldier shot Abu Akleh. Still, Israeli officials never opened an investigation into the shooting, prompting the U.S. to do so.
But Van Hollen reportedly pointed to impediments in the investigation, such as the USSC not being granted access to key witnesses and being “unable to conduct an independent investigation” into the killing.
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Diplomatic relations between Israel and the U.S. were made more complicated at the start of the year by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly emboldened far-right government and its comments on Palestine and Palestinian citizens.
While the U.S. preaches peace between Israel and Palestine, it undoubtedly watches its words closely on Israel, one of its biggest and most powerful allies, largely due to its strategic importance in the Middle East.
