On the evening of Sunday, 10 August 2025, an Israeli airstrike hit a journalists’ tent outside Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, killing Anas Al-Sharif and colleagues working with Al Jazeera. The Israeli military acknowledged deliberately targeting Al-Sharif, intensifying demands for accountability for attacks on the press.
Early reporting identified five members of the Al Jazeera team among those killed: correspondents Al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh, camera operators Ibrahim Zaher and Moamen Aliwa, and camera assistant Mohammed Noufal. Reports also identified freelance journalist Mohammad Al-Khaldi among the victims. Initial accounts put the overall death toll at seven; the number of journalists should be distinguished from the total number of people killed.
Al Jazeera condemned the strike as an attempt to silence reporting ahead of further Israeli operations in Gaza City. Journalists’ organisations and rights advocates called for investigation and accountability, viewing the attack as part of a wider assault on Palestinian reporting.
Al-Sharif, 28, had become one of the best-known faces of Al Jazeera’s Arabic coverage of the war. Shortly before he was killed, he posted about intense bombardment of Gaza City. A separate farewell message, prepared to be published in the event of his death, expressed his commitment to conveying the truth despite repeated pain and loss. That message was released after his death, rather than minutes before the strike.
An acknowledged strike and disputed allegations
The tent stood near Al-Shifa’s main entrance, where journalists gathered to report on events. In acknowledging the strike, the Israeli military alleged that Al-Sharif led a Hamas cell and claimed documents established his connection to its armed wing.
Al Jazeera rejected the allegations as fabrications intended to justify killing a journalist. Al-Sharif had previously denied political affiliations, describing himself as a field reporter documenting the suffering of his community. Colleagues pointed to the routine of his daily work in front of the camera.
Human-rights researcher Muhammad Shehada of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor also disputed the allegations, saying no evidence demonstrated Al-Sharif’s participation in hostilities.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) criticised Israel’s practice of labelling journalists militants without producing credible evidence. The military’s admission that it targeted Al-Sharif does not itself establish the validity of its allegations about him.
Journalists undertaking civilian work are protected under international humanitarian law. Deliberately attacking civilians can constitute a war crime; allegations against a reporter do not remove the need to establish a lawful basis for an attack.
Warnings before the killing
The accusations against Al-Sharif preceded the strike. In July 2025, the military’s Arabic-language spokesperson, Avichay Adraee, published a video alleging that he had belonged to Hamas’s military wing since 2013 and attacking his work for Al Jazeera.
Al-Sharif regarded the campaign as a threat to his life, not simply an attempt to damage his reputation. He told CPJ that reporting on Israeli actions in Gaza harmed the military’s image internationally and prompted efforts to discredit him.
UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression Irene Khan expressed concern about threats against him and described the allegations as unsubstantiated. CPJ warned that the danger to him was acute, while Al Jazeera accused Israeli authorities of systematically inciting against its journalists.
Al-Sharif had publicly warned that the campaign against him threatened his life. His killing turned those warnings into an urgent question about whether international protection mechanisms could offer more than statements.
The case reflects a recurring dispute over attempts to equate Palestinian journalism with militancy. Press-freedom advocates argue that such accusations discredit reporting internationally and can provide a pretext for targeting reporters.
Earlier remarks by Israeli officials illustrate the problem. Following Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing in 2022, military spokesperson Ran Kochav described reporters as being armed with cameras, although he also said they were doing their work. After photographer Yaser Murtaja was killed in 2018 while wearing press identification, then-defence minister Avigdor Lieberman alleged that Hamas activists disguised themselves as journalists and medics, dismissing calls for an investigation.
For journalists, these statements raise a troubling possibility: equipment and markings intended to identify and protect them may instead become grounds for suspicion.
Reporting from the scene
Al Jazeera English correspondent Hani Mahmoud was a building away when the tent was struck. He described reporting the deaths of his colleagues as the hardest assignment of twenty-two months of war. He believed they were targeted because they continued documenting starvation, malnutrition and civilian suffering.
His account echoes testimonies from Gaza’s 2018 Great March of Return protests. Photographer Yasser Qudih, who survived being shot, said Israeli forces had directly targeted positions occupied by journalists. In his experience, the large number of visibly marked reporters had not protected them.
A 2019 UN commission of inquiry found reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli snipers intentionally shot journalists during the protests. It examined the killings of Murtaja and Ahmed Abu Hussein, both identifiable as members of the press.
Guillaume Lavallée, speaking as chair of the Foreign Press Association, warned that reporters covering raids and confrontations feared being shot. The absence of accountability has deepened those concerns.
The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate describes killings, injuries and arrests as part of a systematic effort to intimidate media workers and obstruct their reporting. News organisations have also been affected. In 2021, an Israeli strike destroyed Gaza’s Al-Jalaa tower, which housed Associated Press and Al Jazeera offices. Israel subsequently restricted Al Jazeera’s operations and banned its broadcasts in Israel in May 2024.
Rights organisations argue that attacks on individuals, destruction of media facilities and restrictions on access must be considered together when assessing whether the press is being deliberately silenced.
From Shireen Abu Akleh to Anas Al-Sharif
Abu Akleh was killed in Jenin on 11 May 2022 while covering an Israeli military raid, wearing a helmet and press vest. Israeli officials initially suggested Palestinian gunfire was responsible. Independent investigations subsequently attributed the fatal shot to Israeli forces.
In September 2022, the Israeli military acknowledged a high probability that one of its soldiers had unintentionally shot her, but said it found no grounds for a criminal investigation. Her family and supporters continued seeking accountability, arguing that expressions of regret were no substitute for legal action.
Murtaja and Abu Hussein’s deaths during the 2018 Gaza protests had already raised similar questions. The UN inquiry’s findings did not lead to the accountability demanded by relatives and journalists’ organisations.
CPJ’s 2023 report, “Deadly Pattern”, documented at least twenty journalists killed by Israeli military fire over twenty-two years, with no one held responsible. At least thirteen were clearly identifiable as press or were travelling in vehicles marked as media.
One was Reuters camera operator Fadel Shana, killed by an Israeli tank shell in Gaza in 2008. He wore press-marked protective clothing and stood near a clearly identified media vehicle. The military defended the shooting, citing the possible threat posed by a dark object on a tripod—his camera—and the use of protective equipment by militants.
Such cases underpin the concern that investigations repeatedly end without accountability, even when witnesses and visual evidence identify the circumstances of the killing. Critics argue that inadequate international pressure and political protection for Israel perpetuate that cycle.
Abu Akleh’s niece Lina has repeatedly rejected the idea that an expression of regret amounts to justice. She has urged the United States and the international community to seek meaningful accountability and warned that impunity places other journalists at risk.
Reading the death tolls accurately
Palestinian organisations had recorded dozens of journalists killed since 2000 even before the present war. Their figures differ from CPJ’s narrower documented count because definitions, geographical coverage and verification methods vary.
By 11 August 2025, Gaza’s Government Media Office reported 238 journalists and media workers killed since October 2023. A figure of 186 attributed to CPJ had circulated before the tent strike; it should not be presented as a final post-attack total. Contemporary reports cited different updates, and regional counts may include deaths in Lebanon or Israel as well as Gaza.
For example, Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah was killed in southern Lebanon in October 2023. His death belongs in the wider regional toll, not a geographically defined Gaza total.
The April 2025 Costs of War report from Brown University also stressed the extraordinary speed of the losses. It compared 232 journalists and media workers killed in Gaza from October 2023 to March 2025, using the sources it compiled, with 285 killed in Iraq between March 2003 and March 2025. The latter is a period of twenty-two years, not the 2003–2011 period stated in some comparisons.
Different methodologies prevent treating every total as interchangeable. But the scale and concentration of deaths leave little doubt about the exceptional danger confronting Gaza’s press, overwhelmingly local journalists reporting on their own communities.
Reporters Without Borders and other organisations had already documented extensive losses in the opening months of the war, alongside injuries, detention and other abuses. Early-war totals must not be mistaken for complete figures as of August 2025.
Beyond condemnation
The question is no longer confined to establishing how journalists died. It is why documented killings so rarely lead to accountability, and what protection means when a reporter can warn publicly of threats yet still be killed.
Statements from governments and international institutions matter only insofar as they lead to effective protection and credible investigation. For journalists in Gaza, the gap between the formal safeguards of international law and their daily exposure to violence has become impossible to ignore.
States that profess to defend press freedom face a practical test: will they support international legal proceedings, independent investigations, measures against responsible officials and scrutiny of military assistance? Or will the killing of another clearly identified reporter end with another statement of condemnation?
