It was barely 7:00 am on Wednesday, May 11. The start of a new day with the mundane but never dull school day routine. I started my day by looking through the latest messages and news updates, as I always do. That day, I nearly fell to the ground when I saw the news. Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in Jenin. 

After a lifetime of covering the news, Shireen became the news. 

I first met Shireen about twenty years ago when we were just starting our careers in Journalism in the midst of the second Intifada. We were full of energy and motivation. Our ambitions were not about personal fame or wealth. We were driven, almost obsessed, with the sense of responsibility to tell the story and to break through the longstanding obscuring and muting of Palestinian voices.  Many years later, I was proud to be her colleague as an Aljazeera English correspondent and to see that we still shared the same drive and motivation. 

In life, as in her work, Shireen was graceful and dignified. She was humble and reachable. Shireen was also thoughtful, making time not just for her friends but also for people she met in the field. She checked on them, comforted them, and remembered them during the holidays. 

There was an elegance about her reporting that stemmed from their simplicity and flow. In the midst of all the injustice, structural violence, and despair of life under occupation, Shireen’s graceful reports and steady voice were reassuring. She was the fresh breeze of simple truths and subdued bravado; a messenger who refused to take over the story and elevated the voice of those that mattered the most: ordinary Palestinians in their most vulnerable states of loss, grief, and perseverance despite the odds. She was murdered reporting on the Israeli army’s raid in Jenin, a town in the occupied West Bank.    

Shireen was a household name in Palestine and across the Arab-speaking world. Her steady, calm voice reporting many of the defining moments of Palestinian history in the past twenty-five years was a source of confidence and trust for viewers. People knew this iconic journalist. She was dependable and ever-present on their screens. In many ways, Palestinian families considered her one of their own. 

Grief is a mercurial feeling. It can creep into one’s soul like a steady stream or shatter your heart with one gut-wrenching eruption of sharp emotions. A gushing, punishing stream of memories played in front of me as I watched the video of Shireen’s killing. I remembered friends and colleagues who had suffered her fate in years past at the hands of the same culprit. Ahmad, Yasser, Fadel, Nazeeh, and on and on until Shireen. A dreadful reel of memories, loss, pain, and injustice—perpetual grief brought about by unchecked Israeli violence. 

I have no doubt that every Palestinian journalist felt the same volatile mixture of deep sadness and pent-up anger. In our grief, we let out a collective and long subdued cry for justice that continues to be denied to Palestinian victims of Israeli brutality no matter their age, gender, profession, or protected status. Screens around the world watched as the Aljazeera office in Ramallah turned into an overflowing hub of media professionals united in shock and searing grief. This was personal for us, and the entire people of Palestine. 

Palestinian journalists have a special status in society. They are held to the highly honorable and difficult standard of truth-tellers, entrusted with the narrative of a colonized and persecuted people. A journalist in Palestine is a public figure, who operates within limited private space yet limitless expectations of knowledge, integrity, and readiness for sacrifice. 

Not only that but Palestinian journalists are surrounded by a real and constant threat to their personal safety. They go out to the field, as Shireen did on May 11, knowing full well that their identity as journalists does not offer protection. Rather, it makes them a target for batons, brutality, or even lethal fire, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, with Israel being an occupying power bound by the convention’s provisions on the protection of civilians. On the 26th of April, before Shireen’s killing, the International Federation of Journalists had already filed a case with the International Criminal Court claiming that “Israel’s systematic targeting of journalists working in Palestine and its failure to properly investigate killings of media workers amount to war crimes.”  

According to the  Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedom, Israel targeted thirty-three media offices in Gaza, including the Aljazeera office. So far this year, the Center has documented over 100 Israeli violations against journalists. In the past twenty-two years, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate has documented Israel’s killing of  fifty-five Palestinian and international journalists, the injury of dozens of others, and the detention of scores more. None of these victims has received justice. Not one.  

Professionally, covering a story you are part of is perhaps the most difficult test any journalist can go through. Journalists in Palestine must face that test every day; in addition to informing and laying out the facts objectively, Palestinian journalists must detach themselves from the story, even though it has a direct impact on their lives. Whether it is an Israeli military strike, incursion, or home demolition, Palestinian reporters don’t have the luxury of leaving those stories at the office when they go home. After all, you cannot clock out of your reality no matter how much you might need to sometimes. As we saw with Shireen’s killing, journalists keep pushing on and telling the story—even when that story is the senseless killing of a loved one and an idol. 

And while the glass ceiling has in many ways been long broken and defied by Palestinian female journalists, another more cynical reality is the ever-present component of overt racism they encounter in newsrooms and within the larger public worldwide. Their professionalism and integrity are often questioned to deflect from the crimes Israel commits. But Palestinian journalists have earned their place among the best and brightest in the profession around the world, winning international awards and acclaim year after year.

The outpouring of grief over Shireen’s callous murder across Palestine was historic. The pain was palpable not just because Shireen was a beloved icon but because her murder was a cruel reminder of the complete impunity with which Israel tramples on Palestinian rights everyday and gets away with it. 

Over five days, thousands poured out to the streets of Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, and Jerusalem to express their outrage and pay their due respect to a beloved and respected icon. It was emblematic of a people in collective pain. The killing of Shireen Abu Akleh struck the nation like a bolt of lightning at a time of shared despair and lack of hope. With no political horizon for freedom, complete paralysis in a divided and polarized Palestinian polity, glaring double standards and sometimes outright prejudice, and willful international failure to realize justice, this murder reminded Palestinians that they are in fact one—in grief, anger, and defiance of systemic and historic injustice. 

For generations to come, people will remember how Israeli soldiers brutally assaulted the pallbearers of Shireen’s coffin, frenzied with hate and hostility against the Palestinian flag draping her coffin. They will recount that Shireen’s last graceful story was about unity and dignified defiance in the face of brutality.