Overview
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With 200+ Journalists Killed in Gaza, Shireen Abu Akleh’s Killing Looks Different
Snapshot
Thanks to the documentary team of Who Killed Shireen?, the public now knows who pulled the trigger, ending the life and career of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Questions remain, however: Why did the soldier do it? And will there be justice for the hundreds of Palestinian media workers who have also been killed since Shireen’s death? The film’s executive producer Dion Nissenbaum helps answer them.
Jerusalem Story spoke with Dion Nissenbaum, reporter and executive producer of Who Killed Shireen?, a 40-minute film by the media organization Zeteo. The film uncovers the name of the Israeli soldier responsible for shooting and killing Palestinian-American Shireen Abu Akleh, the beloved Al Jazeera reporter from Jerusalem. The soldier was later killed while stationed in the city of Jenin, making justice elusive. Nevertheless, Nissenbaum says that the impunity Israel enjoys, especially from the United States, has been echoed in the killing of more than 200 journalists and media workers in Gaza since the Gaza Genocide began.
Jerusalem Story (JS): You start the film with the premise that we don’t really know what happened in the killing of Shireen. Why were you so driven to uncover the perpetrator? There are so many similar cases where Israel has refused to give information or covered up the facts.
Dion Nissenbaum (DN): I think one of the animating features of our drive to do the documentary was just the level of misinformation and how successfully Israel had created this false narrative about what had happened to Shireen. It just drove me crazy that so many people, including top US officials who were directly involved in the response to her killing, had a false narrative in their head about what happened. I would talk to top US officials who would say,“ It was an accident.” You know, “Shireen was in the middle of a gunfight and was dodging bullets and it was just a tragic accident.”
And that’s not even what the Israeli military’s own investigation concluded. The Israeli military investigation’s conclusion was that an Israeli soldier falsely identified Shireen as a militant and intentionally shot her, thinking she was a militant. [But] even if you read the Israeli investigation of her killing, that is not clear. It’s completely obfuscated in how they present the story—[it was] a master class in obfuscation. Because so many reporters and researchers did a lot of excellent investigative work at the time to disassemble the false narrative that Israel has created, you can actually see the real picture.
The other thing is that, you know—this was a personal story. My colleague [in the documentary], Fatima AbdulKarim, was friends and peers with Shireen. They were friends in Ramallah, and this was a personal story for us. Shireen was an icon. She was like the Christiane Amanpour in the region. She was compassionate and funny and caring. She was a mentor for so many people. We wanted her to be recognized for who she was and not have her story just be another one that’s forgotten in history.
JS: What did her work and her killing mean to you personally as a journalist who worked [in the region] and who has relationships there?
DN: I didn’t know Shireen, but my colleague Fatima did, and we were both working for the Wall Street Journal when she was killed. This is before October 7, 2023 [and the subsequent war Israel launched in the Gaza Strip]. Fatima went to the Al Jazeera office in Ramallah [Editor’s note: now closed by the Israeli government] right after Shireen was killed and was in the office as they were learning about what happened to her and her colleague, Ali Samoudi, who was injured that day. We were watching the story unfold as it happened and were distressed by how the story was being told.
The film Who Killed Shireen? was released in May 2025 by Zeteo.
Credit:
Zeteo
So many people come up to me [after seeing the film] and spoke about what Shireen meant to them. She was a real mentor to a lot of young journalists, especially female journalists in the region. Because she was committed to the story. She put her life on the line again and again to tell the story of what’s happening to Palestinians under Israeli occupation. She was a compassionate and empathetic reporter.
The other thing about Shireen was that she wasn’t a daredevil, you know. She wasn’t one of these adrenaline-driven reporters who liked to put herself in danger. She took care of her team, and she didn’t take unnecessary risks. She was wearing body armor marked with the word “press” on it to identify her.
JS: The film doesn’t really deal with the issue of why she was shot, whether it was ordered or incidental by this lone actor. Do you have a theory about that?
DN: People have different presumptions about whether that soldier was deliberately trying to kill a journalist. We found no real evidence that the soldiers knew Shireen Abu Akleh was there and were deliberately trying to kill her.
I think that the most charitable interpretation one can make is that the Israeli soldier didn’t care enough about whether it was a Palestinian civilian or a militant. He didn’t take the time to determine if that person was a threat. One of the things that we didn’t get to in the film is that the Israeli soldier that we talked to, who knew the shooter, told us that if he had been in that soldier’s position, he would not have taken that shot.
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It wasn’t proper procedure to take that shot. This was a soldier who was in a protected armored vehicle with his comrades 200 yards away from these journalists walking up the street, and he had plenty of time to determine if Shireen was a militant or not.
A photo of Israeli sniper Alon Scagio, who the team of Who Killed Shireen? determined shot and killed Shireen Abu Akleh. Scagio was later killed in Jenin in 2024.
Credit:
Israel Defense Forces/Social Media
JS: Have you experienced any pushback or been threatened or restricted in any way since the film’s release?
DN: We did not get the kind of blowback that we expected. We talked with [the Israeli military] while we were filming. I talked to them about our findings. They didn’t really push back or attack our film in any significant way.
One significant thing is that when the film came out, the Israeli military asked reporters not to report on the film and not to reveal the identity of the soldier. Almost uniformly across Israeli media, nobody reported on the film. There was only one newspaper, The Times of Israel, that reported on the documentary and its findings. I think that probably blunted some of the negative reaction we might have otherwise gotten.
Shireen Abu Akleh’s producer, Ali Samoudi, was also injured in the shooting attack that killed her in Jenin. In May, before Who Killed Shireen? was released, Israel detained him, and he has been held in Israeli administrative detention to the time of this writing.
Credit:
Nedal Eshtayah/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
JS: What’s next for you or for Shireen’s legacy? Do you see a next step here?
DN: One of the things that we continue to focus on is the fact that Shireen’s producer that day, Ali Samoudi, who is featured in the film and was also shot in the shoulder, was detained by the Israeli military in late April [2025] and has been held ever since without charge under Israeli administrative detention laws.
In the film, what he says is pretty prophetic. He says that he believes that the bullet that killed Shireen was meant to silence Palestinian journalists and intimidate them and prevent them from reporting on what the Israeli military is doing in the West Bank and Gaza. And, sure enough, three months after we did that interview with him and [approximately] two weeks before the film premiere, he was himself detained.
One of the things we wanted to drive home is that the failure of the US to hold Israel accountable for killing an American journalist . . . created this air of impunity for the Israeli military to understand that America and the world were not going to hold them accountable for killing a foreign journalist, which paved the way for [Israel] to become the most dangerous country in the world for journalists, having killed over 200 journalists in Gaza since October 7, 2023 without any serious ramifications.
We want to keep a spotlight on them and remind the world that they are our journalist comrades and our colleagues, and they deserve the same protections that a journalist from The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal would get if they were covering an active war somewhere in the world.