WASHINGTON (AP) – U.S.
officials have concluded that gunfire from the Zionist regime’s positions likely killed Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, the State Department said Monday.
The finding, in a statement from State Department spokesman Ned Price, came after what the U.S. said was inconclusive tests by independent ballistics experts under U.S. oversight of the bullet fragment recovered from Abu Akleh’s body.
“Ballistic experts determined the bullet was badly damaged, which prevented a clear conclusion” as to who fired the shot, Price said in the statement.
Abu Akleh, a veteran correspondent and a Palestinian citizen who was well known throughout the Arab world, was shot and killed while covering a Zionist military raid on May 11 in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. Palestinian eyewitnesses, including her crew, say the regime’s troops killed her and that there were no militants in the immediate vicinity.
The occupying regime says she was killed during a complex battle with Palestinian militants and that only a forensic analysis of the bullet would confirm whether it was fired by a Zionist trooper or a Palestinian.
U.S. security officials had examined results of both Palestinian and occupying regime investigations and “concluded that gunfire from IDF (Zionist troops) positions was likely responsible for the death of Shireen Abu Akleh,” Price said.
Meanwhile, in another development, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh says the Zionist regime continues to withhold the bodies of Palestinians killed by the regime’s troops to use them in laboratories of medical schools in flagrant violation of human rights.
“The occupation authorities are augmenting the pain of the families bereaved at the loss of their children by withholding the corpses of their children and using them in the laboratories of medical schools in Israeli universities in flagrant violation of human rights, values, principles and scientific ethics,” Shtayyeh said at weekly cabinet meeting in the central West Bank city of Ramallah on Monday.
The Palestinian premier further called on world’s universities to boycott the Israeli colleges involved in withholding Palestinians’ bodies killed by Zionist gunfire in order to put pressure on Tel Aviv to show respect for the dead Palestinians and to immediately release the dozens of withheld corpses so that their families can bid them farewell in a manner that befits them and respect their feelings.