New film claims to identify Israeli killer of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh
A new US-made documentary has produced evidence pointing to the identity of an Israeli soldier who shot dead the Palestinian-American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, in 2022.
The documentary, Who Killed Shireen?, concludes that a member of Israeli special forces unit Duvdevan (Cherry) shot Abu Akleh while she was reporting for Al Jazeera in Jenin, on the West Bank.
The Israeli government, led by Naftali Bennett at the time, initially tried to cast blame on Palestinian militants for her death, but after a few months admitted that Israeli troops were probably responsible.
However, the Israelis never identified the unit or individual responsible, nor did they allow the Biden administration access to them.
The new documentary, made by the Zeteo media organisation, sets out not only to identify the soldier responsible for the journalist's death, but also to show the failure of the US government to hold the Israeli military to account.
An unnamed Biden administration official said that a US team that investigated the incident came to the conclusion that an Israeli soldier intentionally shot Abu Akleh and should have been able to see that she was a journalist.
'The evidence as it stands, based upon the proximity of the reporters in the road and the soldiers from the Duvdevan units on the street, it was an indication that it was an intentional killing of Shireen Abu Akleh,' the official told the film-makers, with his voice altered to preserve his anonymity.
'Whether or not they knew it was her or not can very well be debated, but they would have absolutely known that it was a media person or a non-combatant at a minimum'.
However that initial assessment was rejected and the Biden administration continued to maintain publicly that they believed the killing to be unintentional.
Two Israeli soldiers identified the soldier who shot Abu Akleh as Alon Scagio. Scagio was promoted to captain and moved to another unit after the shooting, and was killed in combat in Jenin in June 2024.
'He wasn't happy like, hey – I killed a journalist of course. But he wasn't like eating himself from the inside, thinking about what have I done?' one of his comrades said in a recorded interview about the killing.
'When you [turn] the corner and you have this second to take a decision, to take a shot and you see someone who holds a camera or something like that pointing at you, you don't need more than that to shoot the bullet,' the unnamed Israeli soldier said.
When the Biden administration called for changes of the Israel rules of engagement to reduce the chance of journalists being killed in the future, 'we got a very public brush-off,' Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen told the film-makers.
Questions to the Scagio family were referred to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which said in a statement: 'Zeteo has decided to publish the name of the IDF soldier who fell during an operational activity, despite the family's request not to publish the name, and even though they were told that there is no definitive determination regarding the identity of the individual responsible for the shooting that caused the journalist's death.'
'The IDF shares in the family's grief and continues to support them,' the statement said, referring to the Scagio family.
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Telegraph
41 minutes ago
- Telegraph
‘Enjoy the fireworks': Cautious optimism on the streets of Tel Aviv
Alerts blared out on phones across Israel at 7.30am on Sunday and, just a minute or so after the blast doors were pulled tight, deep percussive thuds reverberated through the Tel Aviv bomb shelter. It was one of the largest salvos of recent days, with at least 40 ballistic missiles fired at the Jewish state from Iran. All across the country, people were hunkering down, most unaware of the overnight US strikes on Fordow and Iran's other nuclear facilities. Sleep has been hard enough for most Israelis over the last week, with phones often inundated with missile alerts and news notifications in the dead of night. The 15 to 20 people in the Tel Aviv hotel shelter sucked in a collective breath with the thud of the impacts but quickly turned to their phones to peruse reports on the night's action. One by one, smiles spread across sleepy faces with the knowledge that the US had joined Israel in its fight against Iran. This is a country where people have long believed that 'strength' is all. 'For me, the biggest message this sends is that no one f---s with us,' a young South African-born Israeli told me after the blast doors opened. Seven kilometres to the north, a ballistic missile had slammed into the densely compacted residential neighbourhood of Ramat Aviv. Others caused devastation in Ness Ziona, south of Tel Aviv, and the northern city of Haifa. There were no deaths, but more than 100 people were reported injured. The shockwave at the Tel Aviv housing estate sheared off the outside wall off an old but smart-looking concrete apartment block and destroyed multiple neighbouring houses. That block alone contained 34 apartments and an adjacent high-rise had its windows blown out from top to bottom on the blast-facing side, making hundreds homeless. It is thought that at least 20 were injured there. A senior police officer said at the scene that tragedy was averted because everyone got to their safe rooms. The contents of the apartments – clothes, kitchen implements, children's toys – were strewn across the rubble, as hundreds of residents evacuated with what belongings they could save. They join nearly 9,000 Israeli civilians who are now homeless because of the missile strikes, according to the Israel Defense Forces. With the US strike and Iran's retaliation came new emergency lockdown orders from the government, which once again closed most shops and businesses. Nevertheless, the mood on the streets of the city was upbeat, if muted. People nodded knowingly as Telegraph reporters made their way to the blast scene, with several offering fist bumps. 'It's good, but I'm not sure', said one woman of the US strikes. 'Every day, it's a new adventure here. You don't know what comes next. We just want to live.' At a local Mizrahi-run cafe, the owner offered your correspondents a complimentary shot of arrack. 'Congratulations', he said. 'Enjoy the fireworks'. Excitement – good and bad – comes in quick succession in Israel, and no one pretends to know how things will pan out. Over the past week, there had been real anxiety that Donald Trump would decide against military action and leave Israel hanging. Now the mood has lifted, but the country remains under attack. Eldad Shavit, a former head of Mossad's research division, warned on Sunday that Iran was 'ideologically driven' and no one should expect it to give up. It could continue firing missiles at Israel for a 'month or more' based on estimates of its remaining stocks and there was some tentative evidence to suggest it was firing new missiles that were better at evading Israel's celebrated defence systems. Terrorism could also not be ruled out through its proxies, including Hamas and Hezbollah, which were badly damaged but not entirely degraded, she said. The war is also costing Israel economically and politically. The government is coming under mounting pressure over the provision of bomb shelters and temporary accommodation for the 9,000 Israelis whose homes have been destroyed in the past week. Although most of the missiles and drones targeted at Israel have been intercepted, many have got through, causing considerable damage and spreading anxiety and fear. At least 24 Israelis have been killed in the attacks and the number of wounded now exceeds 900, with thousands of homes destroyed and their occupants displaced. 'After the first deaths, everything changed,' the South African-born Israeli told The Telegraph. 'People saw what a ballistic missile really means. The blast is enormous. From then, everyone is trying to go to a shelter, but there are not enough.' Some 57 per cent of Israel's homes do not have a 'mamad' or safe room as of last year, according to the Israeli Builders Association. And about a quarter of Israelis do not have access to any hardened shelter. The shortage – concentrated in poorer areas often dominated by Arab Israelis or new immigrant communities – is leading to overcrowding and growing discontent. Stories documenting the problem have become a mainstay of local media. Video footage and pictures shared with The Telegraph show a shelter in a down-at-heel district of Tel Aviv so crowded that its blast door could not be closed during an air raid alert on Thursday. Dozens of other people were left standing outside the entrance to the shelter without access to any hardened protection, the person who provided the images said. In response to mounting pressure, the Israeli government approved a plan on Friday to renovate 500 public bomb shelters and deploy 1,000 new mobile roadside shelters across the country. 'In light of the security situation, the government approved via a phone vote a plan to accelerate home front defence,' the defence ministry said. The provision of temporary accommodation for those left homeless by Iran's assault on civilian infrastructure has also become a pressing issue for the Israeli state. Such is the power of some of Iran's ballistic missiles that they can cause hundreds of homes in Israel's densely packed cities to be destroyed in a single blast. The Telegraph witnessed one such strike in the city of Holon, just south of Tel Aviv, on Thursday morning where 746 people from 250 families had to be relocated after their homes were classified as uninhabitable. Sunday's strike on Ramat Aviv was of a similar magnitude in terms of damage. As of Friday at 3pm, 30,735 damage claims had been received by the Israel Tax Authority, including 25,040 related to buildings, 2,623 related to vehicles and another 3,006 related to other property. Most of the displaced are being put up in hotels if they cannot stay with friends or relatives. Caroline Molcho was relocated temporarily to the Dan Panorama hotel in Tel Aviv after her home was destroyed in a strike last week. The French-Israeli had been in a safe room in her apartment when the missile hit. 'I feel so lucky – it really saved my life, but now we have no idea how long this process will last, how long will I stay here. The future is now really uncertain,' she said.
The Guardian
43 minutes ago
- The Guardian
How the carefully planned US bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities unfolded
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The British, French and German foreign ministers seized the opportunity to meet their Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, for talks in Geneva on Friday but to little or no avail. Trump himself was characteristically dismissive of European efforts. 'Nah, they didn't help,' he told journalists. We know now that and the B-2 flights over the Pacific were part of the same elaborate ruse to ensure Iran was off its guard and looking the wrong way, and that the president's declared two-week diplomatic window was likely to be part of the same ploy. The Pentagon described the eight bombers that were spotted flying west as a decoy, a deception effort known only to an extremely small number of planners and leaders in Washington and at central command headquarters in Tampa, Florida. As they were tracked across the western states and then the Pacific, another seven B-2s took off from Whiteman base and headed in the opposite direction – eastwards. These seven planes made no communications with each other or with the ground as they crossed America and flew unnoticed over the Atlantic. The planes and their two-pilot crews flew all day and into Saturday night, refuelled mid-air along the way by tankers that had been deployed to Europe over the previous week. The careful orchestration and prepositioning, some of it predating the Israeli surprise attack on Iran on 13 June, raises questions over how early Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu decided to join forces to go to war against Iran, and over how much of the US president's professed interest in a diplomatic solution, and apparent effort to discourage an Israeli attack, was all part of the charade. As far back as May, during a visit to Doha, Trump went out of his way to denigrate the B-2's design, declaring 'I'm not a huge believer in stealth', because it made for an 'ugly plane'. By the time the flight of seven of these ugly planes arrived in the Middle East at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, it was midnight local time on Saturday. The mission they had been assigned was codenamed Midnight Hammer, and to carry it out the bombers were joined by an escort of US fighter jets, surveillance and reconnaissance planes deployed in the region earlier – 125 aircraft in all. Together they flew on eastwards, with hardly a word exchanged between the pilots, to maintain the all-enveloping secrecy surrounding the operation. At the same time as the warplanes reached the Lebanese coast, a US submarine loitering somewhere in the Arabian Sea launched Tomahawk cruise missiles, synchronised to reach their targets in Iran at the same time the bombers arrived. The Tomahawks flew low over the Gulf of Oman and up over south-east Iran as seven B-2s and their accompanying fighters crossed Lebanon, Syria and Iraq (according to a map provided by the Pentagon on Sunday) and entered Iran from the north-west at about 1.30am local time. The chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, Dan Caine, described the whole operation as 'a complex, tightly timed manoeuvre requiring exact synchronisation across multiple platforms in a narrow piece of airspace, all done with minimal communications'. The primary target was the farthest north, near the Shia religious centre of Qom, the underground enrichment facility at Fordow, generally thought impregnable to every conventional weapon with the possible exception of America's biggest bomb, the 30,000lb (13,500kg) GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator. The seven B-2s approaching from the north were each carrying two of them. The second target was Natanz, Iran's first enrichment facility, and the third was a complex of facilities outside the ancient city of Isfahan, which is linked to other parts of the nuclear fuel cycle, and which had already been partly damaged by Israeli bombing. Before the bombers arrived at these targets, according to Caine's account, their fighter escort swept the area for any sign of Iranian warplanes, released decoys and opened fire on air defence sites on the ground. Apparently, there was no return fire. The Pentagon was 'unaware of any shots fired at the US strike package'. Iran's defensive shield had been flattened over the preceding week by relentless Israeli sorties. The bombers struck between 2.10am and 2.35am Iranian time, the Pentagon said, hitting Fordow at 'several aim points'. It was the first time the enormous GBU-57 bunker-busting bomb had been used in a US operation. It is unclear how many of the total of 14 were dropped on Natanz or Isfahan. The Tomahawk missiles fired by the navy were all aimed at Isfahan, Caine said, and landed slightly after the other two facilities were struck. The US warplanes turned around and headed back the way they had come, leaving Iranian airspace at 3am. By that time, reports had surfaced on Iranian media of explosions in the region of the nuclear facilities, and a quarter hour later, Trump confirmed the operation in the way he has made most of his presidential announcements – on his private online platform, Truth Social, complete with key words in all-capitals. 'A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow,' Trump wrote. 'All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!' Addressing the nation a little later on television, Trump said the targets had been 'totally and completely obliterated', a claim that was modified over the course of Sunday to 'severely damaged'. The president appealed once more for Iran to sue for peace, which he has made clear would involve a surrender of all its nuclear programme. The message was repeated by other members of the administration throughout the day. Midnight Hammer would be a one-off US intervention, as long as Iran did not try to fire back and complied with the terms laid down by him and Netanyahu. Any retaliation, Trump said, returning to all caps on Truth Social, would be met with 'FORCE FAR GREATER THAN WHAT WAS WITNESSED TONIGHT'. By the end of Sunday, however, there was no sign of compliance from Tehran. Araghchi, vowed that Midnight Hammer would have 'everlasting consequences' adding that Iran reserved the right to 'all options to defend its sovereignty, interest, and people'. Iran played down the impact of the US bombs, saying that the country's reserves of high-enriched uranium had been removed from Fordow long before, and all the damage inflicted could be repaired. On Sunday morning, Iran launched a new salvo of missiles at Israel, one of which flattened most of a city block in north Tel Aviv. By the end of the day, Iran's parliament had approved a bill calling for the closing of the strait of Hormuz, the gateway to the Persian Gulf, through which over a fifth of the world's oil needs flows daily. Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, warned that the US must 'receive a response' to its attacks. Tehran has previously threatened to target US bases spread across eight countries in the region, if the US were to join the Israeli attacks. In reality, its military capabilities are constrained by the withering attacks of the past 10 days, but late on Sunday the regime was saying it would explore all its options, while making clear that submission was not one of them.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Gun-wielding attacker killed at church in suburban Detroit
A gunman opened fire during a service at a suburban Detroit church on Sunday, wounding one person before he was shot and killed by a security guard, police said. The person shot in the leg was the security guard, according to what the church's pastor told the Detroit News. No one else was hurt in part because a church member ran the attacker over with a truck, said the CrossPointe Community church pastor Bobby Kelly Jr. The shooting happened at CrossPointe in Wayne, a city of about 17,000 people, at about 11am, Kelly Jr told the Detroit News. Kelly said the security guard had time to shoot the attacker because the attacker was run over by a church member driving a truck. 'He was run over by one of our members who saw this happening when he was coming into church,' Kelly said to the newspaper. Police described the slain intruder as a 31-year-old white male. In a statement shortly before noon on Sunday, authorities asked the public to avoid the area around the church, saying the investigation into the violence there remained under active investigation. About 150 people were attending the service, including children, Kelly said. Congregants' startled reaction to the gunfire on Sunday was captured on the service's online live stream. Kelly told the Detroit News that members of the CrossPointe church started a security team about a decade ago in response to violence at other places of worship around the US, although his congregation in Wayne had not received threats of violence. 'We are sitting ducks to someone who wants to come and do harm,' Kelly said to the newspaper. Kelly reportedly added that the children in attendance on Sunday were 'doing good' after the attack and that congregants were supporting each other. He told the Detroit News his church would 'put a formal plan in place for the aftermath' of Sunday. The Associated Press contributed reporting
