On the evening of Sunday 10 August 2025, an Israeli air strike targeted a journalists’ tent pitched opposite the Al-Shifa Hospital complex in Gaza City, killing prominent Palestinian journalist Anas Al-Sharif and four of his colleagues at the Al Jazeera channel, in addition to their assistant. The attack took place while the journalists were clearly wearing press insignia inside an exposed area, which raised accusations that it was a deliberate assassination of journalists, not mere collateral damage. The Al Jazeera network condemned the killing of its crew, describing the incident as “a desperate attempt to silence the voices exposing the coming seizure and occupation of Gaza”, and considering the targeting of journalists part of a systematic campaign to suppress the truth. The attack provoked a wide wave of anger in international press and human rights circles, and was considered a possible war crime that requires accountability, especially after the Israeli occupation army acknowledged its direct responsibility for the strike.
Anas Al-Sharif (28 years old) was one of the most prominent journalistic faces in Gaza since the outbreak of the latest war, and was known for his field coverage for the network in Arabic. Shortly before his assassination, he published a message on the “X” platform in which he described the intense Israeli bombardment of Gaza City as “non-stop for two hours“. In a message he had prepared to be published after his death, he wrote that despite the pain and loss he had lived through again and again, he never hesitated for a single day to convey the truth as it is, without distortion, hoping that God would bear witness against those who stay silent about their killing or justify it. Minutes after those words, Al-Sharif himself turned into breaking news: another journalist killed while conveying the tragedy.
Details of the assassination and the occupation’s narrative
The attack on the journalists’ tent killed seven people, among them five members of the Al Jazeera channel’s crew: Anas Al-Sharif, correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh, and cameramen Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa. The bombardment took place in front of the main gate of Al-Shifa Hospital, where the journalists were gathering to document events. Hours after the incident, the occupation army issued a rare statement in which it explicitly admitted carrying out the strike and deliberately targeting Anas Al-Sharif, but it accompanied the admission with an accusation that Al-Sharif was the leader of a cell belonging to the Hamas movement, claiming to possess documents that “conclusively prove” his link to the Al-Qassam Brigades.
The Al Jazeera network rushed to refute these accusations, describing them as fabrications to justify the crime, and recalling that Al-Sharif had previously denied any political affiliation, stressing that he was merely a field journalist conveying the suffering of his people. His colleagues confirmed this position, as one of them said that “the whole routine of his daily life was standing in front of the camera from morning until evening”, denying any participation by him in combat activities. Likewise, human rights researcher Mohammed Shehada of the Euro-Mediterranean Monitor stated that there is no evidence proving Al-Sharif’s participation in hostile acts, describing the Israeli accusations as “a big zero of evidence”.
The contradiction in the occupation’s narrative raised deep doubts, as the occupation claimed the assassination while accusing the journalist of terrorism without presenting any tangible evidence. This approach prompted international organisations to question the intentions of the occupation state and its respect for press freedom. In a strongly worded statement, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said that “Israel’s usual pattern of labelling journalists as terrorists without credible evidence raises serious questions about its intentions and its respect for press freedom”, stressing that journalists are civilians and may never be targeted, and demanding that those responsible for these crimes be held accountable.
A campaign of demonisation and ready-made accusations against Palestinian journalists
The Israeli army’s accusations against Anas Al-Sharif were not born of the moment; rather, they came as the culmination of a public campaign of incitement and demonisation that preceded them by weeks. In July 2025, Avichay Adraee, the occupation army’s Arabic-language spokesperson, launched a personal campaign against Al-Sharif on social media, and published a video accusing him of membership of Hamas’s military wing since 2013, describing Al Jazeera, where he worked, as “the most dangerous and most insolent channel”. Al-Sharif considered these statements a direct threat to his life, and said in an interview with the Committee to Protect Journalists that “Adraee’s campaign is not merely a media threat or an attempt to tarnish my image, but a real threat to life”, adding that his coverage of the occupation’s crimes in Gaza “disturbs them and damages their image before the world”.
This campaign raised concern among international bodies concerned with freedom of expression, as Irene Khan, the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, expressed her alarm at the repeated Israeli threats against Al-Sharif, and described Tel Aviv’s claims as “unsubstantiated” and “a flagrant assault on journalists”. Shortly before his assassination, the Committee to Protect Journalists had expressed its grave fear for his life as the military smear campaign against him escalated, while the Al Jazeera network accused the Israeli authorities of waging a systematic “incitement campaign” against its journalists in Gaza, and considered that the occupation was fabricating evidence to link its correspondents to the Palestinian resistance.
This approach is not new; since the outbreak of the war on Gaza in October 2023, the occupation state has persistently accused any Palestinian journalist of being a member of Hamas if he conveys a narrative it does not approve of, in an attempt to strip Palestinian media coverage of legitimacy and brand it with terrorism, which provides a pre-emptive pretext to justify targeting them. Experts stress that this policy serves two purposes: tarnishing the reputation of the Palestinian journalist globally in order to reduce the impact of his reports, and creating a justification for targeting him physically with the army’s bullets or shells.
It reached the point of publicly describing journalists as “armed with cameras”. Commenting on the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, military spokesperson Ran Kochav told Army Radio: “They are armed with cameras, if I may say so”. Such statements reveal a mindset that sees the camera as a weapon and the journalist as a potential enemy. In 2018, when photographer Yaser Murtaja was killed by an occupation army sniper’s bullet in Gaza despite wearing a press vest, then defence minister Avigdor Lieberman refused to open any investigation, claiming that Hamas activists “disguise themselves as paramedics and journalists”, and described the calls for an investigation as “a festival of nonsense”. With these positions, the equation was turned upside down: the victim is accused of terrorism, and the press insignia is stripped of its value as a shield that is supposed to protect the one who wears it.
Testimonies from the field
Anas Al-Sharif’s colleagues recount the details of the moments that preceded his assassination, stressing that what happened was not a random error but a deliberate targeting aimed at breaking the witnesses to the truth. Journalist Hani Mahmoud, Al Jazeera English’s correspondent in Gaza, was one building away at the moment the missile fell on the tent, and said that covering the news of the killing of his colleague Anas was the hardest thing he had done throughout twenty-two months of war. He added that the army targeted them because they insisted on exposing the crime of starvation and the humanitarian suffering in Gaza, “They were killed because they did not stop reporting the facts of famine and malnutrition… because they convey the truth of this crime to the world”.
This testimony intersects with what Palestinian journalists confirmed during the Marches of Return in 2018. Photographer Yaser Qudih, who survived after being hit by a sniper’s bullet, recounted that the occupation forces were deliberately targeting gatherings of journalists, and that the large number of press vests in the field made them clearer targets. He explained that displaying press insignia did not provide protection, but rather placed them in the line of fire: “The number of journalists was large and the occupation forces were trying to push them away… they were directly targeting the journalists’ positions”.
An investigation issued by the UN international commission of inquiry in 2019 found reasonable evidence that occupation snipers deliberately fired at journalists during the Gaza protests, confirming that Yaser Murtaja and Ahmed Abu Hussein were killed by deliberate fire despite wearing press equipment. Despite this, no one was brought to account. Guillaume Lavallée, president of the Foreign Press Association, says that “many correspondents have come to fear being shot” during coverage, noting that the absence of punishment has encouraged soldiers to pull the trigger even if the person targeted is wearing a press helmet.
The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate reports that attacks on journalists (killing, wounding and arrest) continue systematically as part of a policy to suppress the Palestinian people, considering this a means of intimidating media workers and deterring them from carrying out their mission. The matter has not been limited to individuals, but has included entire media institutions; the occupation forces bombed numerous press headquarters in Gaza during previous wars, most notably the destruction in 2021 of Al-Jalaa Tower, which housed the offices of international agencies including the Associated Press and Al Jazeera. The authorities also closed media offices in Jerusalem, prevented journalists from covering or entering, and banned the broadcasting of the Al Jazeera channel and designated it an undesirable entity in May 2024.
All these facts clearly indicate that the targeting of the press is not a set of isolated individual acts, but a deliberate approach that parallels the military battle on the ground with another battle over the narrative and the truth.
From Shireen Abu Akleh to Anas Al-Sharif: a pattern of impunity
The case of Anas Al-Sharif represents a new link in a long chain of targeting journalists in Palestine without accountability. Journalistic memory is still weighed down by the memory of the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh on 11 May 2022 by an occupation forces sniper’s bullet in Jenin, despite her wearing a clearly marked press helmet and vest while covering a military raid. At the time, the occupation denied its responsibility and blamed “stray Palestinian fire”, and its military spokesperson even went so far as to say that Shireen and her colleagues were “armed with cameras”, as if their presence were a threat in itself. Later, after independent journalistic investigations proved that a bullet from an occupation soldier struck her in the head, the army admitted in September 2022 a “high possibility” that one of its soldiers had shot her “by mistake”, but at the same time it stressed that no soldier would be held accountable. On the first anniversary, the military spokesperson merely expressed “deep regret” without any action to achieve justice, while her family, who hold American citizenship, continued their moves in international courts with the support of the Al Jazeera network and Reporters Without Borders.
What happened to Shireen was no exception. In Gaza in 2018, journalists Yaser Murtaja and Ahmed Abu Hussein were killed by live bullets that struck the abdominal area left exposed by their press vests, while they were covering the “Marches of Return”. A 2019 UN report confirmed that there were reasonable grounds to believe that occupation snipers had deliberately targeted them, and despite international demands, no real criminal investigation was opened. Indeed, officials, among them Avigdor Lieberman, came out to insinuate that the two men killed may not have been “real journalists” but “disguised terrorists”, in a repetition of a fixed method: denial, then accusing the victim, then complete impunity.
This pattern is documented in the Committee to Protect Journalists’ report “Deadly Pattern”, which recorded the killing of at least 20 journalists by occupation forces’ fire over 22 years before the 2023 war, without accountability. The report noted that at least 13 of them were clearly wearing press insignia when they were killed. Among the oldest of these cases is that of photographer Fadl Shanaa, who was killed in 2008 in Gaza when a tank fired a shell directly at his position, even though his car and his camera bore press markings. At the time, the occupation justified not punishing the soldiers by saying that the press shield is “also common among terrorists”, and that the camera he had placed on a tripod “may have appeared to be a threat”. Thus the case was closed without accountability, as were dozens of cases that followed it, leaving Palestinian journalists facing a recurring scene: documented killing, official denial, then complete impunity.
This repeated pattern of impunity has become akin to an unwritten policy. No soldiers are tried and no commanders are questioned, even though the killings of journalists are documented in sound and image in many cases. Observers believe that the reason lies in the absence of sufficient international pressure, and in the network of political protection that the occupation enjoys, which leaves it confident that it will not face serious legal consequences.
In this context, Lina Abu Akleh, Shireen Abu Akleh’s niece, says that the past two years have been painful for her family because of the thwarted wait for justice. She adds: “We should not wait another year without justice… The apology (from the occupation), which was not a real apology, is not accountability. Accountability requires actual measures”. Lina warns that continued impunity has encouraged the occupation to go on targeting more journalists in Gaza, calling on the United States and the international community to shoulder their responsibilities in pursuing the killers, from the lowest-ranking soldier to the top of the chain of command.
Statistics from the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate and from international organisations indicate that dozens of Palestinian journalists have been killed by the bullets of the occupation forces since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000. Some Palestinian sources estimate the number of journalist martyrs at between 50 and 55 from that year until early 2022, that is, before the current war. Then the 2023–2025 Gaza war came to raise the toll to unprecedented levels.
According to the “Costs of War” project of the Watson Institute, in cooperation with human rights organisations, the latest war is the deadliest in modern history for journalists. By August 2025, the Government Media Office in Gaza announced that 238 journalists and media workers had been killed since the outbreak of the war on 7 October 2023. The Committee to Protect Journalists, for its part, documented the killing of at least 186 journalists in the same period, among them 178 Palestinians who died by the fire of the occupation forces. The difference between the two figures is attributed to differences in counting methodology, but in all cases it is a shocking number that exceeds the toll of any other conflict against media workers.
By comparison, in the Iraq war, which was the deadliest for journalists before Gaza, 299 journalists and media workers were killed over a full decade (2003–2011), which highlights the scale of the losses in Palestine over a much shorter period. Organisations such as the International Federation of Journalists and the International Press Institute indicate that the overwhelming majority of the victims in Gaza are local Palestinian journalists, as they made up 95% of the total victims in the Committee to Protect Journalists’ count. Among those killed are foreign journalists, including a Lebanese journalist working with Reuters who was killed by occupation shelling in southern Lebanon.
Reporters Without Borders stated that at least three members of the Al Jazeera channel’s crew have been killed since October 2023, and that more than 100 Palestinian journalists were martyred in the Gaza Strip during the first seven months of the war, and described what is happening as “a bloody chapter in the occupation’s war on the Al Jazeera channel and the Palestinian media”. In addition to killing, organisations have documented dozens of cases of injury, arrest and torture against Palestinian journalists, but deliberate killing remains the most serious of these violations, as the apex of the pyramid in silencing the media voice.
Taken together, these statistics show that the occupation tops the global list of states in which journalists are killed at the hands of the army, if the figures since the start of the century are combined. Despite this, not a single judicial conviction has been recorded so far against any official of the occupation forces for killing a Palestinian journalist, which raises a serious question about the extent of the international system’s commitment to protecting the press.
The question being asked today no longer concerns how journalists are killed, but why their killers remain unaccountable. What is the use of statements of condemnation issued by the United Nations, the European Union or the White House if they stop at the limits of the texts? And what does “press freedom” mean if the journalist in Gaza knows that he may be targeted and that justice may never reach his case?
States that proclaim their defence of media freedom find themselves facing a real test. If international laws protect journalists, the measure of their effectiveness lies in their ability to deter any state accused of killing them in full view of the cameras. The question remains: can statements of denunciation be turned into practical steps, such as referring the cases of the killing of Palestinian journalists to the International Criminal Court, imposing sanctions on the political and military officials involved, halting military support to the accused forces, and forming international commissions of inquiry with a binding mandate, independent of the consent of the accused party?
Editorial correction: The first version of the report gave the names of the two cameramen as “Maan Aliwa” and “Fadel Shanaa”; the correct names are “Moamen Aliwa”, the Al Jazeera channel cameraman who was killed with Anas Al-Sharif, and “Fadl Shanaa”, the Reuters news agency cameraman who was killed in Gaza in 2008.
