Anas al-Sharif knew that far from offering protection amid the slaughter in Gaza, his press credentials further endangered him. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) warned last month of acute danger to the 28-year-old’s life as the Israel Defense Forces stepped up online attacks on him. These were not merely smears, but a death threat in response to his coverage, the Al Jazeera reporter said. And now he is dead, one of five media workers killed in an airstrike on Sunday.
The CPJ says that more than 180 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed in almost two years of war – more than the number who have died globally in the previous three years. This does not merely reflect Gaza’s vast death toll – 61,599, most of them women and children, according to the health ministry and many more if independent experts are correct. Nor does it merely reflect the courage shown by reporters, photographers, camera operators and others in a war zone. The CPJ says 26 of the reporters were targeted.
Israeli officials have bragged of killing Mr Sharif, whom they have claimed was the head of a Hamas terrorist cell, planning rocket attacks against Israeli civilians. Mr Sharif and Al Jazeera had already denied this. It would surely be hard for such a prominent figure to combine reporting with command of such a unit. The documents offered up by Israel as evidence end two years before the war began, and were reportedly screen grabs of electronic spreadsheets, not independently verified.
Israeli officials have repeatedly offered wildly misleading and rapidly shifting accounts of events, including the killing of paramedics in Gaza this spring. In 2023, an IDF general reportedly told American officials within hours that one of its soldiers had probably shot dead the acclaimed Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the occupied West Bank – but Israeli officials insisted publicly that Palestinian militants were to blame. No justification has even been attempted for the deaths of Mr Sharif’s colleagues.
Mr Sharif’s 90-year-old father was killed in an airstrike on their home in late 2023, after Israeli military officials called the journalist telling him to stop reporting and leave Gaza. Israeli claims that he was a Hamas fighter resurfaced last month after his emotional reporting on starvation went viral. He was killed as outrage mounted over Gaza’s famine and shortly after Israel announced its plan to launch a ground offensive in Gaza City, which would only deepen the catastrophe and is reportedly opposed by many in the military too. The deaths of the Al Jazeera team in the city ensure few are left to bear witness to what unfolds. International correspondents are unable to enter Gaza except on escorted military trips during which they cannot speak to Palestinians.
Sheltered by the US, Israel’s government appears unmoved as international public opinion turns against it and even staunch allies blench at the horrors of Gaza. The Al Jazeera killings have been widely and rightly condemned. The Reporters sans Frontières group has also urged the international criminal court to investigate the treatment of media workers.
“If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice,” Mr Sharif wrote in a posthumously published statement. Deliberately targeting journalists is a war crime: an assault not only on the person, but on truth itself. Yet it cannot disguise Israel’s other atrocities. Rather, it adds to the charge sheet against its leaders.
