Real Lives
Shireen Abu Akleh chose journalism over architecture and became Palestine's voice
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
She went to Jordan in 1987 to become an architect. She came home a reporter, and for twenty-five years hers was the voice that told the Arab world what had happened in Palestine that day.
Shireen Abu Akleh was born in Jerusalem in 1971 and grew up in Beit Hanina. Her father's family were Greek Melkite Catholics from Bethlehem; her mother's, Greek Orthodox from Jerusalem. She spent part of her childhood with relatives in New Jersey and held American citizenship alongside her life in the city she never really left.
The degree she abandoned#
She enrolled at the Jordan University of Science and Technology to study architecture.
The first Intifada was underway at home, and the universities in the occupied territories were closed by military order. Watching it from Irbid, she decided the story needed telling more than the buildings needed drawing, and transferred to Yarmouk University to read journalism.
She took her degree there and went back.
Building a press from nothing#
Her first work was in a Palestinian media landscape that barely existed. She was among the journalists who established the Voice of Palestine radio station in 1994, and she worked for Amman Satellite Channel, Radio Monte Carlo and UNRWA before television found her.
Al Jazeera had been on air for a single year when she joined in 1997. She was twenty-six.
Twenty-five years on the same beat#
What followed was the most sustained body of daily reporting any Palestinian journalist has produced. She covered the second Intifada, the siege of Arafat's compound, the assaults on Gaza, the raids in Jenin and Nablus, the funerals, the demolitions, the elections that did and did not happen.
She worked the same ground for a quarter of a century, which is why viewers trusted her: she was not parachuted in for a crisis and gone by the next one.
Arab households knew her sign-off before they knew her face. She was called the daughter of Palestine.
What she opened for women#
Arab satellite television in 1997 did not send many women to cover armed raids at dawn.
Abu Akleh did it for twenty-five years without ever making her presence the subject, and a generation of Arab women went into broadcast journalism having watched her do it. Several of the correspondents filing from Gaza today say plainly that she is the reason they took the job.
That is a body of work in itself, and it exists alongside the reporting rather than instead of it.
The street sign in Ramallah#
She was killed in Jenin on 11 May 2022, covering an Israeli raid, wearing a vest marked PRESS.
Her funeral procession in Jerusalem was attacked by Israeli police, and the images of pallbearers struggling to keep her coffin from falling travelled as far as her reporting ever had.
Al Jazeera referred her killing to the International Criminal Court. Investigations by the United Nations human rights office and by several news organisations concluded that the fatal shot came from Israeli forces; Israel eventually acknowledged that one of its soldiers most likely fired it, while denying she was targeted deliberately.
The street in Ramallah where Al Jazeera's bureau stands now carries her name. A scholarship, a museum and a memorial library elsewhere carry it too.
The record#
Strip away how it ended and the career still stands on its own: a woman who trained in the wrong subject, changed course because the story demanded it, joined a start-up channel at twenty-six, and spent the next twenty-five years reporting one place with a precision nobody has matched since.
Palestinians did not follow her because of what happened in Jenin. They followed her for twenty-five years before it.
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