Israel Has Murdered Al Jazeera's Last Journalists in Gaza
Israel's war on the press continued, in one of the darkest days for journalism in a century.
On August 10, 2025, the world witnessed one of the most blatant and deliberate assaults on journalism in modern history. In a single Israeli airstrike outside Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the last remaining members of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau were killed: Anas al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Moamen Alaywa, and Mohammad Nofal.
Anas al-Sharif, 28, had become one of the most important journalistic voices in Gaza over the course of Israel’s ongoing genocide. His daily reports, often delivered under the roar of airstrikes, brought the world raw, unfiltered truth from the ruins of northern Gaza. He did this work despite repeated threats from Israeli officials and an escalating smear campaign designed to paint him as a legitimate military target.
On the night of his assassination, al-Sharif posted footage of relentless bombing near his location. Two minutes later, an Israeli missile obliterated the tent where he and his colleagues were working. The Israeli military wasted no time taking credit, releasing a graphic with al-Sharif’s face stamped with the word “eliminated.”
A Calculated Killing
The IDF’s claimed that al-Sharif was a Hamas operative. The claim is both familiar and hollow. In this war, every Palestinian journalist killed by Israel has been posthumously accused of terrorism. The pattern is as clear as it is cynical: smear, kill, deny, repeat.
Al Jazeera itself called the attack “a new blatant and deliberate assault on press freedom” and vowed to pursue accountability. But accountability from Israel has always been a mirage, fading the moment the news cycle moves on. The international community’s failure to demand action after repeated journalist killings in Gaza only emboldens this pattern.
Since October 2023, Israel has killed over 237 journalists in Gaza, more than any military force in recorded history. By comparison, fewer than 70 journalists died across all theaters of World War II. This is not the cost of war; it is the cost of telling the truth under an occupation that fears it.
Every strike on a press vest, every missile that collapses a media office, is part of a larger strategy: remove the storytellers, and you remove the story. Without these reporters, Israel’s massacres, mass displacements, and starvation campaigns could be hidden behind official talking points and the complicity of foreign media. The world would be left with a distorted narrative crafted by those committing the crimes.
International Journalism’s Moral Collapse
Western outlets that eagerly brand Russia’s targeting of journalists in Ukraine as war crimes suddenly lose their vocabulary when the perpetrator is Israel. This silence is not neutrality, it is complicity.
Journalists who continue to defend Israel in the wake of these murders are collaborators. They lend legitimacy to a regime that has made the killing of reporters a routine tactic of war. They should be treated accordingly: blacklisted, discredited, and remembered as the ones who stood by while their colleagues were hunted down.
The attack on Al Jazeera’s team came on the very day Israel announced it would allow more journalists into Gaza. This is not irony, it is strategy. Israel kills the last prominent voices in northern Gaza, then opens the door for carefully managed, escorted, and censored reporting from foreign correspondents. The story of Gaza will continue, but told through the lens of those permitted to see only what the occupier allows.
Remembering the Fallen
This is not just about one strike or one network. The names of the dead should be spoken as a roll call of resistance:
Anas al-Sharif
Mohammed Qreiqeh
Ibrahim Zaher
Moamen Alaywa
Mohammad Nofal
They join a list that should never have existed, hundreds of journalists and media workers who died because Israel understood the power of their work and feared it.
These are the Journalists Who Were Killed by Israel for Telling the Truth
Since the start of Israel's war on Gaza in October 2023, journalists and media workers in the besieged enclave have been killed at an unprecedented rate. While international press organisations have struggled to maintain access, Palestinian journalists have remained on the ground, documenting the war at tremendous personal…
The Broader War on the Press
This is not an isolated incident. Israel has bombed media offices, arrested reporters, and targeted press-marked vehicles for decades. In 2021, the IDF destroyed the building housing Al Jazeera and the Associated Press in Gaza. In 2018, Israeli snipers killed Yaser Murtaja and Ahmed Abu Hussein, both wearing clearly marked press vests. In each case, the excuse was the same: unsubstantiated claims of militant activity.
Without journalists, the record of Gaza’s destruction becomes easier to distort. Israel’s narrative that it is fighting a war of self-defense against a faceless enemy can dominate unchallenged in newsrooms that have lost their last independent witnesses on the ground.
The absence of real-time, credible voices from Gaza will leave future historians sifting through propaganda instead of testimony. That is exactly what Israel wants.
Our Duty to the Dead
For those of us still able to write, publish, and speak freely, there is no neutral position left. You cannot claim to support press freedom and remain silent in the face of its deliberate destruction. You cannot mourn these journalists without condemning the state that killed them.
If journalism means anything, if it has any value beyond career advancement and brand management, then every newsroom, every press freedom NGO, every journalist worth the title must treat this as a line in the sand. Either you stand against the killing of reporters, or you stand with the killers.
History will remember who chose which side.
And for Anas al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Moamen Alaywa, Mohammad Nofal, and the hundreds of others whose voices were silenced, history must also remember this: they did their jobs until the last breath, facing not just the ordinary dangers of war but the certainty that they themselves were targets. Israel may have killed them, but it cannot kill the truth they left behind.