Journalist Shatha al-Sabbagh killed by PA fire, colleagues describe her ambition to tell Jenin’s story

On Saturday, Shatha al-Sabbagh, a 22-year-old Palestinian journalist, was killed by Palestinian Authority security forces in Jenin, her family said. 

“We hold the Palestinian Authority and its security forces directly responsible for this crime, and we affirm that this dangerous escalation reflects the transformation of these forces into repressive tools that practice terrorism against their own people instead of protecting their dignity and confronting the Occupation,” the Sabbagh family said in a statement released to her Telegram channel.

Sabbagh, as well as her brother who was affiliated with Hamas’s armed wing in Jenin, are among 11 people killed during an operation the PA has conducted over recent weeks inside the Jenin refugee camp.

The figure includes both combatants and noncombatants. The PA didn’t respond to a request for clarification on the number.

Last week, the Jenin Brigades, which is affiliated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, announced that it had killed an officer in the PA’s security forces during a shootout in the camp.

Video footage said to show the last minutes of Sabbagh’s life and shared with Mada Masr by a resident in Jenin shows a firefight on the streets of the camp, and then quiet. An ambulance passes by on its way, as Sabbagh’s family said, to pick up their daughter who had been shot in the head and who died before paramedics could provide aid.

In their statement, Sabbagh’s family said that she was killed outside of her home while she was in the presence of her mother and two small children. They also said there was no fighting taking place in the vicinity and that it was a sniper’s bullet that struck her head.

The PA security forces’ spokesperson, Anwar Rajab, denied that its forces were involved in the killing, saying it was “a heinous crime committed by lawless individuals who fired indiscriminately, resulting in Shatha's death and damage to a nearby house.”

The PA has described its weeks-long operation on Jenin as seeking to prevent something like October 7 happening again. Yet numerous residents speaking previously, earlier on in the operation, said they just wanted things in the camp to “return to normal after so many days of fighting,” and hoped the PA would soon withdraw.

The campaign has seen PA forces occupy residents’ homes in the camp, turning upper levels into sniper lookouts to take control of the space below. The PA has also cut power to the camp intermittently throughout the past three weeks, and the camp’s school, operated by UNRWA, has been closed.

Shatha, a student at Al-Quds Open University, had hoped to report on the experience of Palestinians living through the escalation in violence across the West Bank and in Jenin in particular, where she lived with her family. According to her colleague, Jarah Khalaf, Sabbagh hoped “to be a very strong journalist.” Posts on her Instagram show her reporting on developments in Jenin during the operation, one of which was posted just ten hours before her death.

Sabbagh was only just embarking on her career as a journalist, and her friend, Nagham Zayet, said, “She was a friend to everyone in the camp and was always willing to help. She was incredibly ambitious.”

Sabbagh was among journalists on the ground in Jenin who have described an atmosphere of intense repression at the hands of the PA. Videos circulating on social media appear to show PA forces humiliating people after detaining them in the camp. Earlier this week, Palestinian journalist Wahaj Bani Moufleh was detained by security forces for his coverage of the operation in Jenin. In one video, a detainee was shown being pushed into a trash can before he was arrested as PA officers looked on.

In a separate incident, PA security forces fired on a crowd of civilians with live ammunition and stun grenades as they protested the arrest of the fighters who had been injured during the skirmishes, as was reported by Mada Masr. Khalah confirmed to Mada Masr that journalists in Jenin have been mistreated by security forces: “We are expelled from Jenin Government Hospital and prevented from photographing the security services that are in the hospital, and threatening messages are also delivered to some journalists to prevent them from covering up.”

Palestinian journalists have become targets amid Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip since 2023. According to the Committee to Project Journalists, at least 141 journalists have been killed during Israel’s war on Gaza.