Israel’s military targeted and killed five Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza on Sunday, including Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif.
Israel’s military targeted and killed five Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza on Sunday, including Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif, who only three weeks earlier had appealed to the Committee to Protect Journalists over fears he might be assassinated.
Al-Sharif began reporting for Al Jazeera a few days after the war began in 2023. He was known for reporting on Israel’s bombardment in northern Gaza, and later for covering the hunger gripping much of the territory’s population.
In a July broadcast, al-Sharif cried on air as a woman behind him collapsed, apparently from malnutrition.
«I am talking about slow death of those people», he said in the report.
Israel took responsibility for the strike, claiming al-Shariff was a leader of a Hamas cell — an allegation that Al Jazeera and al-Shariff had previously dismissed as baseless, The Associated Press reported. The incident marked the first time during the war that Israel’s military has swiftly claimed responsibility after a journalist was killed in a strike.
Since the war began, Israel has refused to allow international journalists into Gaza, apart from rare invitations to observe Israeli military operations with IDF escorts— meaning the burden of documenting the war there has fallen on Palestinian journalists inside the Strip. That work has been deadly: At least 178 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed during the war, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The Foreign Press Association, the oldest association of international journalists in the world, condemned Israel’s targeting of journalists reporting on the war in Gaza.
