On Monday, the Israeli army admitted for the first time that there was a “high probability” that Al Jazeera pan-Arab television journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed in May by one of its own soldiers, AFP reported.

An Al Jazeera star, an American-Palestinian journalist was shot and killed on May 11 while covering an Israeli military operation in the Palestinian camp of Jenin, a stronghold of Palestinian armed groups in the occupied northern part of the West Bank, where special forces were trying to detain “suspects”, leading to armed clashes.

After the death of Shirin Abu Akleh, who was wearing a bulletproof vest with the words “press” and a protective helmet, the Palestinian Authority and the Al-Jazeera TV channel immediately blamed the Israeli army for the journalist’s murder. Israel, on the other hand, has consistently denied the allegations, despite journalistic investigations and a UN report that concluded that it was Israeli fire but ruled out that it was intentional.

But on Monday, the Israeli military released the “final findings” of its investigation and admitted that one of its soldiers had indeed shot the journalist after misidentifying her. “There is a high possibility that Ms. Abu Akleh accidentally came under fire from the Israeli army, which was directed at suspects identified as Palestinian armed militants.”

The Israeli military said it had studied the sequence of events “in chronological order”, analyzed locations, video and audio recorded at the scene, carried out “simulation of the scene” and that “Israeli experts” had conducted a ballistics analysis of the scene. On July 2, in the presence of representatives of the US Security Coordinating Committee for Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

The “poor condition of the bullet” made it “difficult” to determine its origin, the army said in its report, saying it was not “unequivocally” certain about the origin of the shot that killed the journalist.

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