CPJ official: Why did Washington delay in investigating Sherine Abu Aqle's death?

Robert Mahoney, project officer at the Committee to Protect Journalists, criticized the White House's handling of the killing of Al-Jazeera correspondent Sherine Abu Aqleh, and called on President Joe Biden's administration to open a transparent and independent investigation into the incident.

Mahoney said that the United States rushed to send a team from the FBI when the American journalist Daniel Pearl was killed in Pakistan in 2002 to investigate his killing, but did not move a finger when the American-Palestinian journalist Sherine Abu Aqleh was killed in the West Bank occupied by Israel earlier this year. general.

In an article in the American newspaper, The Hill, Mahoney asked: Why didn't the Biden administration send a team to conduct a comprehensive field investigation into the killing of the Al-Jazeera correspondent?

Are American citizens of Palestinian origin less important than others in the eyes of the US administration?

Does the US administration give Israel special preferential treatment over all its allies?

He said that these are some of the questions raised by the Biden administration's failure to open an independent investigation into the killing of Abu Aqelah, despite the call for it by 57 members of Congress and 24 senators.

He pointed out that the Biden administration condemned the killing of the Al-Jazeera correspondent, but absolved Israel of moral responsibility for another crime in a long series of murders of journalists in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The official at the Committee to Protect Journalists - a non-governmental organization that defends press freedom around the world and is based in America - said that the failure of the United States to act decisively about the killings of journalists exacerbates the cancer of impunity that is increasingly eroding the foundations of a free press in various countries. parts of the world.

He highlighted that Israel has always ignored the accusations of violations committed by its security forces against Palestinian journalists, realizing that the United States will protect it from exposure to any significant international sanctions.

He said that the Committee to Protect Journalists, whose projects he works as director of, has documented the killing of 18 Palestinian journalists by Israeli fire over the past two decades. The cases of their killings have not been fully investigated by neutral parties, nor has the Israeli army published the results of its internal investigations into their killings.