After Shireen Abu Akleh, a celebrated Palestinian American journalist, was fatally shot in the West Bank in 2022, the State Department delivered an equivocal assessment.
While shots fired from Israeli military positions were “likely responsible,” it said, American officials “found no reason to believe that this was intentional.” The shooting, it said, was “the result of tragic circumstances.”
That statement outraged Palestinians and many others, who saw it as the latest instance of the Israeli military dodging accountability for Palestinian deaths. The United States never again publicly weighed in on Ms. Abu Akleh’s killing.
But the U.S. officials who closely examined the shooting were deeply divided over the Biden administration’s public conclusions, with some officials convinced that the shooting was intentional, according to five current and former U.S. officials who worked on the case.
There has been no conclusive evidence that the shooter knew he was targeting a journalist. Still, based on the circumstances of the shooting and the available evidence, these officials believed that the Israeli soldier must have been aware he was doing so. Other officials assigned to review the case, however, supported the U.S. government’s far more cautious assessment, the officials said.
One of those who opposed the Biden administration’s conclusion was Col. Steve Gabavics, a career military policeman with 30 years’ experience, including as the commandant of the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay. At the time of the shooting, he was an official at the Office of the United States Security Coordinator. That office, which facilitates cooperation between the Israeli and Palestinian security services, conducted the U.S. review of the shooting.
After Colonel Gabavics retired from the military in January, he went public — first in a documentary, and now in an interview with The New York Times — with his concerns that the U.S. government had soft-pedaled the office’s findings to appease the Israeli government.
He aired his views in a documentary released in May by Zeteo News, a left-leaning online news outlet, that publicly identified for the first time the Israeli soldier who shot Ms. Abu Akleh. But Colonel Gabavics was not named in the documentary; he is now speaking out openly for the first time.
Though the question of whether the shooting was intentional ignited disagreement within the office as a whole, the two officials who clashed most sharply over the shooting were Colonel Gabavics and his then-boss, Lt. Gen. Michael R. Fenzel, according to Colonel Gabavics and several other former officials involved in the examination.
That conflict culminated in Colonel Gabavics being sidelined from the U.S. review, the officials said. Colonel Gabavics said General Fenzel also threatened to dismiss him.
The four officials who spoke to The New York Times about the case — besides Colonel Gabavics — did so on the condition of anonymity because they remain employed by the government or military and are not permitted to speak publicly.
Colonel Gabavics was chief of staff to General Fenzel, who led the U.S. Security Coordinator liaison office at the time and helped draft the July 4, 2022, State Department statement attributing the shooting to “tragic circumstances.”
Colonel Gabavics said in an interview that he and his colleagues “were just flabbergasted that this is what they put out.”
That the U.S. government avoided calling it intentional, he said, “continued to be on my conscience nonstop.”
“The favoritism is always toward the Israelis. Very little of that goes to the Palestinians,” he said of his experience working in the office.
But General Fenzel was adamant that there was not enough evidence to rule out the possibility that the fog of war had led to an accidental killing, according to two of the officials.
“Ultimately, I had to make judgments based on the full set of facts and information available to me,” General Fenzel said in a statement to The New York Times. “I stand by the integrity of our work and remain confident that we reached the right conclusions.”
The four officials said they believed Colonel Gabavics was acting out of concern for what he saw as the truth.
For General Fenzel’s part, some officials said one factor that may have played into his thinking was a desire to preserve his office’s working relationship with the Israeli military, which had previously stopped cooperating when displeased.
Two of the officials, including one who served at the liaison office at the time of the shooting and a second who was working on Palestinian issues, said General Fenzel had sought to maintain the relationship while also pushing the Israeli military for reforms.
Examining the Shooting
The office where both General Fenzel and Colonel Gabavics worked, now known as the Office of the Security Coordinator, found itself examining the shooting after Israeli and Palestinian officials, who carried out their own independent investigations, refused to cooperate on a joint inquiry.
The F.B.I. initially declined to investigate because, according to Colonel Gabavics, it said it had not been requested to do so by Israel. With the Biden administration under pressure from lawmakers, the F.B.I. eventually opened its own investigation in November 2022. Nearly three years later, however, it has not released any findings, nor said when it might do so.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the Biden administration assigned General Fenzel’s team — which is not an investigative agency — to assess the case and write a report on the evidence.
To analyze the trajectory of the bullets, Colonel Gabavics and other colleagues were sent to examine the scene on the day Ms. Abu Akleh was killed, the colonel and other officials who worked on the review said.
A key part that the U.S. office played in the investigations was to take custody of the bullet that killed Ms. Abu Akleh and hand it to Israeli government ballistics experts for testing in the presence of the American officials, including General Fenzel. The Israeli experts also examined an Israeli Army rifle that the Israelis said a soldier had used to fire in Ms. Abu Akleh’s direction.
The 2022 State Department statement said that extensive damage to the bullet made it hard to draw a definitive conclusion about which gun it was fired from.
The U.S. team also reviewed the separate Israeli and Palestinian investigations into the killing, but it did not conduct interviews with witnesses or perform its own tests.
Colonel Gabavics described himself as the lead U.S. investigator on the case. Three others who worked on it, however, said that while he played a key role, he was not assigned to come up with a final judgment. That responsibility fell to General Fenzel.
Colonel Gabavics said he and others on the team agreed that the Israeli soldier who shot Ms. Abu Akleh must have known that he was shooting at a journalist, though they did not believe that the shooter was targeting Ms. Abu Akleh specifically.
Colonel Gabavics said he concluded the shooting was deliberate based on several factors:
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Records of Israeli military radio traffic on the morning before the shooting showed that soldiers were aware of journalists in the area, he said. And there had been no gunfire coming from the journalists’ direction that might make the Israeli soldiers likely to shoot toward them in self-defense, he said.
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There was an Israeli military vehicle down the road from Ms. Abu Akleh that morning. A sniper watching the road from inside the vehicle would have been able to see the journalists clearly, Colonel Gabavics said.
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When he visited the scene of the shooting hours after it occurred, he said, his colleagues, wearing blue vests similar to Ms. Abu Akleh’s navy-blue protective vest marked “Press,” positioned themselves where she had fallen. They were visible to him from where the shooter’s vehicle had been, he said.
Colonel Gabavics said that the precision of the shots, hitting Ms. Abu Akleh’s head and a carob tree near her, did not suggest an uncontrolled spray of gunfire. That, together with the fact that the shooter fired first at Ms. Abu Akleh’s producer, then at her, then at a passerby who tried to help, indicated to him the shooting was deliberate, he said.
An investigation into the shooting by The New York Times in 2022 found that 16 shots were fired from the approximate location of the Israeli military convoy, most likely by a soldier from an elite unit.
For the shooting to be accidental, “the most absurd thing in the world” would have had to happen, he said. “The individual popped out of the truck, just was randomly shooting, and happened to have really well-aimed shots and never looked down the scope. Which wouldn’t have happened,” he said.
His assessment matched that of Palestinian officials. Israel, for its part, said that Ms. Abu Akleh was hit by either an Israeli soldier or a Palestinian gunman firing indiscriminately during clashes with Israeli soldiers, and insisted its soldiers would not intentionally hurt a journalist. Evidence reviewed by The Times for its investigation, however, showed that there were no armed Palestinians near Ms. Abu Akleh when she and her colleagues came under fire.
Colonel Gabavics said he shared his findings orally with General Fenzel and also wrote them into a draft of the office’s report on the shooting.
But General Fenzel disagreed, and shared his assessment with the State Department, which publicly deemed the shooting unintentional.
The office still had to finish its report on the shooting, however, and that became the focus of the internal tug of war.
Colonel Gabavics and three of the former officials at the office said he repeatedly inserted stronger language into the draft, which General Fenzel repeatedly deleted. Eventually, the general ordered his chief of staff off the case, the colonel said.
General Fenzel declined to comment on Colonel Gabavics’s assertions.
Colonel Gabavics continues to believe there had been a miscarriage of justice.
“This was the one that probably bothered me the most” of any case in his career, he said. “Because we had everything there.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Vivian Yee is a Times reporter covering North Africa and the broader Middle East. She is based in Cairo.
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