On Anas al-Sharif

An examination of the pretexts invoked to justify an act of murder

The Hasbara Symphony Orchestra has been playing overtime (tempo: goebbelissimo fortissimo) to legitimize what Israel has confirmed was the pre-meditated assassination of Al-Jazeera’s chief correspondent in Gaza City, Anas al-Sharif, on 10 August 2025.

The justifications being put forward by Israel, its apologists, and flunkies for al-Sharif’s murder fall into several categories:

1. Anas al-Sharif was not a journalist and was merely masquerading as one: Anyone who has been watching Al Jazeera in even cursory fashion since October 2023 will know enough to dismiss this claim as pure fabrication of the first order. On a typical day it would have been impossible to watch the Arabic-language broadcaster for even an hour without encountering a report by al-Sharif or an interview with him. He was probably the hardest working journalist in the Gaza Strip, and certainly in the north of the territory, diligently reporting day in and day out, seven days a week, without fail.

If there is one fact about Anas al-Sharif that cannot be seriously contested it is that he was a genuine journalist, and a particularly good one at that. Prior to joining Al Jazeera in late 2023, al-Sharif had been a member of a Reuters group of photographers that in 2024 won a Pullitzer Prize for its work. He was thereafter recruited by Al Jazeera because videos he had been posting on social media of Israeli attacks on the Jabaliya Refugee Camp, where he lived, were going viral.

If Anas al-Sharif cannot be considered a journalist, there are no journalists.

2. Anas al-Sharif was a legitimate target for assassination precisely because he worked as a journalist with the Al Jazeera network: Andrew Fox, a former British military officer who has become a prolific propagandist spreading serial falsehoods on Israel’s behalf during the Gaza Genocide, argues that Anas al-Sharif “was a legitimate target because he was an Al Jazeera journalist” (emphasis in original).

In a lengthy and rather convoluted post on Twitter/X morbidly entitled “When Does a Journalist Become a Legitimate Military Target? Maybe Not Often Enough”, Fox argues that al-Sharif was an “information warrior” because Al Jazeera’s reporting constitutes “state-directed strategic communication” whose “coverage has been decisive” in generating “international pressure” that “has materially constrained Israel’s freedom of manoeuvre”.

“If that is not direct participation in hostilities,” Fox confidently asserts, “then nothing is”. On this basis, he concludes, “the IDF [Israeli military] is within its legal rights under LOAC [the Laws of Armed Conflict] to treat Al Jazeera’s Gaza-based personnel, facilities, and transmission infrastructure as legitimate military targets”. “There is a further argument”, he helpfully adds, “that Al Jazeera facilities worldwide have become actively involved in the conflict and, therefore, are [also] legitimate military targets.” Predictably, Fox assures us that not murdering journalists “does not make us more humane”, it just leaves Israel “fighting with one arm tied behind its back”.

It is unclear whether Fox is calling for the Israeli air force to kill all of al-Sharif’s remaining colleagues and bomb Al Jazeera’s numerous offices around the world or, having reviewed his own record as a full-time charlatan in a rare moment of self-reflection, intended this harebrained screed as a farewell note as he prepares to kill himself to prove the point.

That such an argument can even be considered, let alone wildly applauded by Fox’s fellow Israel flunkies, attests to both the ongoing and frankly hysterical propaganda campaign unleashed against Qatar and Al Jazeera by the Hasbara Symphony Orchestra, and the degree to which Palestinians and their journalists have been demonized, dehumanized, and delegitimized by the Orchestra’s frantic musicians over the course of decades, particularly so since October 2023.

Given the certainty with which Fox insists Anas al-Sharif should have been murdered and Al Jazeera bombed into oblivion, it is unclear whether Fox even understands the individuals and journalism he is denouncing. Specifically, Fox nowhere claims fluency or knowledge of Arabic, the language in which al-Sharif and Al Jazeera broadcast their news. Similarly, a web search reveals no evidence Fox is conversant in Arabic or has an even basic knowledge of the language.

One person who considers language proficiency particularly relevant in this regard is none other than Andrew Fox. In a November 2024 Twitter/X post dismissing testimony by Professor Nizam Mamode, a retired British surgeon who served in Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis during the Gaza Genocide, that the Israeli military was using drones to target children, Fox first rejects Mamode’s account on the fabricated pretext that the Israeli military “doesn’t have drones with small arms capability”.

Perhaps realizing that impugning the integrity of both Professor Mamode and his young patients is a bit of a stretch given his earlier fib, Fox then asserts that Mamode does not speak Arabic and on this basis concludes that the real source of Mamode’s blood libel or whatever it is these days is Mamode’s translator, “who gives the Hamas line”. Presto.

But if translation is indeed such dangerous territory, and a lack of language proficiency sufficient to call into question the observations of a surgeon and the wounded children in his care, wouldn’t and shouldn’t this cautionary note apply tenfold to someone calling for a global campaign of terrorism based on a language he doesn’t understand?

As for Fox’s claim that the Israeli military doesn’t possess or use “drones with small arms capability”, National Public Radio (NPR) several days after his post ran a story citing numerous eyewitnesses confirming that the death squad state routinely deploys “sniper drones”. On 14 July of this year, the Israeli investigative reporter Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine published a lengthy report, based on testimony collected directly from Israeli soldiers and commanders, that “the majority of Israeli companies in Gaza use these drones [armed with hand grenades]” and “deliberately target civilians” with them. If printed confirmation is insufficiently persuasive, Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi had the previous month published actual video footage of one such attack.

In other words, translation or no translation, Professor Mamode’s observations were as accurate as a sniper’s bullet. Fox’s rebuttal by contrast has the potency of evaporated water.

Andrew Fox, for those who don’t know of him, likes to tout his military credentials and knowledge of military affairs, and additionally describes himself as a Middle East specialist. He has yet to encounter anything about the Israeli military that does not arouse him, and condescension is his preferred mode of engagement. One can therefore either conclude that he is monumentally ignorant of precisely those issues he claims to know better than other mere mortals, and has yet to learn that bullets and hand grenades are universally considered as “small arms”, or accept that there is a reason he is characterised as a bloodthirsty charlatan by those who take the trouble to investigate his various fictitious claims. While he no longer describes himself as a “disinformation specialist”, he remains a seasoned practitioner.

If despite the above one nevertheless insists on taking Fox’s perfectly lunatic arguments seriously, it would require only a single image of what remains of the Gaza Strip, or the staggering death toll among its civilian population, or a picture of emaciated Palestinian children reduced to skin and bones to determine whether Al Jazeera’s reporting has in any way conferred a military or political advantage to Hamas, or indeed constrained Israel’s genocidal military campaign in any manner whatsoever.

By the same token, these same images and data offer more than a clue about which reporting and whose propaganda has indisputably manufactured consent for Israel’s genocidal military operations and contributed to their apocalyptic outcome.

Does this mean that death squads should roam the world with silencers, piano wire, and Semtex, dispensing with “information warriors” and blowing up their facilities? Are we supposed to start with mass executions of US journalists who peddled the Iraqi WMD hoax so critical to enabling the illegal 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq? Or of Israeli journalists whose blood-curdling genocidal incitement has regularly featured in its media?

If Al Jazeera’s news reporting can legitimately be characterized as “state-directed strategic communication”, where does that leave the rest of the global media? The question applies not only to state-owned broadcasters in authoritarian systems, but at least equally to ostensibly independent media in democratic states where broadcasters and publishers repeatedly, and more importantly voluntarily, serve as stenographers for power, particularly during wartime.

Israel, whose media not only operates under strict military censorship but for the most part also considers it a patriotic obligation to support the war effort, would be a good place to start. Even more so influential outfits which, as recent court cases have demonstrated, negotiated agreements with the country’s prime minister to promote his personal agenda. One would however wait in vain for a demagogue like Andrew Fox to accept that charity begins in the genocidal home.

Indeed, if the matter is proposed as a universal standard rather than one solely reserved for Palestinian journalists like Anas al-Sharif or Arab media organizations, Fox’s psychopathic dystopia would be unanimously rejected.

Infinitely more reasonable are the criteria adopted at the Nuremberg trials to convict Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Stürmer, for crimes against humanity on the basis of his ceaseless incitement to genocide. This is a standard, it should be added, that does Fox no favours and would see al-Sharif as a witness for the prosecution rather than an accused defendant.

Streicher was not accused of direct responsibility for a single murder. Yet his role in enabling the Holocaust was deemed sufficiently pernicious that he was sentenced to death by hanging and subsequently executed.

3. Anas al-Sharif was a combatant in the accepted sense of the term as used by sane analysts: By any standard, a combatant is considered a legitimate target during armed conflict. Israel has claimed that al-Sharif was not only a combatant in Hamas’s military wing, the Martyr Izz-al-Din al Qassam Brigades, but also a member of its elite Nukhba force and the commander of a Hamas rocket unit.

Israel has produced a number of documents (more accurately, screenshots of documents) to support these allegations, which it claims to have captured from Hamas during its ground offensives into the Gaza Strip. Given that Israel has been making accusations of this nature against al-Sharif for over a year, and in October 2024 specifically referenced documents in its possession as the basis for its campaign against al-Sharif, this means that the purported Hamas documents substantiating Israel’s case will have been in Israel’s possession, and have been properly analyzed, since last year.

The above scenario immediately raises questions about the timing of al-Sharif’s assassination. Israel has repeatedly vowed to thoroughly eradicate Hamas, and to destroy the movement’s military forces and command structure in particular. The Israeli military has also prioritized the neutralization of Hamas’s rocket capabilities. Additionally, Israel has for years regularly slain Palestinian journalists, and has since October 2023 killed more media workers, often in targeted assassinations, than have fallen in all other major conflicts of recent decades combined.

In other words, the account as presented by Israel simply doesn’t add up. We know Israel does not hesitate to target either Hamas commanders or journalists, including journalists working for Al Jazeera. We know Israel has insisted that al-Sharif was a Hamas commander in a press vest. We know Israel claims it has had definitive proof to this effect for approximately one year. Yet at the same time, for reasons entirely unexplained, Israel decided to leave Anas al-Sharif free to pursue the activities he is accused of until this week. And this even though al-Sharif was constantly visible and presented Israel’s death squads with one of the easiest targets in the entire Gaza Strip.

To believe all this to be simultaneously true, which is a prerequisite for Israel’s account to acquire even minimal credibility, requires a level of credulity well beyond that demanded by the tooth fairy and Santa Claus combined.

In this respect, Israel’s decision to kill al-Sharif along with an entire Al Jazeera crew by bombing their press tent (the attack also conveniently also killed fellow Al Jazeera north Gaza correspondent Muhammad Qraiqea and their film crew), rather than targeting him individually or his purported Hamas rocket squad, offers an important clue about Israel’s real agenda and motives. Israel’s repeated warnings to al-Sharif to, according to his own account, “stop reporting for Al Jazeera” and leave the northern Gaza Strip offers another. And Israel’s killing of al-Sharif’s father, Jamal, in December 2023, shortly after his son joined Al Jazeera and began receiving Israeli threats, offers yet another.

Those familiar with al-Sharif’s routine furthermore scoff at the Israeli allegations, on the grounds that he was so intensely consumed by his media work that he would have required days long in excess of twenty-four hours to pursue any other activity, let alone command a military unit during wartime.

As for the documents furnished by Israel, these have as in similar previous cases been widely denounced as fabricated. More often than not, as with Daniel Hagari’s famous presentation of a hospital calendar denoting nothing more than the days of the week as a roster for guarding Israeli captives within that hospital, the accusation that Israel fiddles with paperwork has been substantiated.

Yet taking Israel’s latest document dump at face value doesn’t particularly strengthen its case. According to the documents Israel produced in October 2024, and as reported by Times of Israel military correspondent Emmanuel Fabian, al-Sharif was “the head of a rocket launching squad and a member of a Nukhba Force company in Hamas’s Nuseirat Battalion”. Apart from explaining how he fulfilled both these functions during a period of intensive military operations while simultaneously working around the clock for Al Jazeera, Nuseirat is in the western part of the central region of the Gaza Strip, and al-Sharif lived and worked in Jabaliya, northeast of Gaza City. Regularly commuting between the far north of the territory and its central governorate between filing reports for Al Jazeera was not exactly an option in 2024.

Perhaps realizing the absurdity of its own story, Israel put out an entirely different one after it murdered Anas al-Sharif. But no less ludicrously, he was now presented as a “soldier”, and a “commander of an artillery company”, and also a “soldier in a Nukhba company”. More conveniently, Israel’s documents transferred him from Hamas’s Nuseirat Battalion to its East Jabaliya Battalion.

Another document released by Israel claims that al-Sharif was injured in a military training accident several years ago that left him with “severely diminished hearing in his left ear, diminished sight in his left eye, and severe headaches”. Although the document indicates 2017 as the year of the accident, it was compiled in 2023 (his age is noted as 26) for what appears to be the purpose of monitoring payments to injured fighters.

In other words al-Sharif was, according to Israel, in 2023 still designated as an injured combatant, and one who had been injured seriously enough to remain eligible for compensation payments six years after the fact. This makes it at best extraordinarily unlikely he could have been sufficiently fit to fulfil any let alone the multiple military roles specified in Israel’s other documents, and certainly incapable of combining any of these with his grueling schedule for Al Jazeera.

Once again Israel’s multiple and contradictory claims simply don’t add up, and the disconnect between its allegations and its actions is wholly unbridgeable. Israel’s claims on this score can therefore be safely dismissed with a wave of the hand.

Indeed, this appears to be yet another case where Israel’s ability to feed a constant diet of bullshit to its stenographers in the Western media, who generally respond with little more than a plea to pass their compliments to the chef, has produced a level of lazy complacency and amateurish incompetence unable to withstand even minimal scrutiny.

There is of course the fallback option that al-Sharif is a former Hamas combatant. If so, it is completely irrelevant. Former members of a military force are not combatants. The alternative to this long-established principle is that in any armed conflict every individual who has ever served in a military or militia – including former conscripts – can legitimately be killed regardless of age, sex, profession, or location at the time they are targeted.

As a thought experiment, let’s proceed from a favorite Hasbara Symphony Orchestra talking point, which equates Hamas with Germany’s Nazis as well as the Islamic State (IS) movement.

In the case of Germany, there is no evidence that demobilized German soldiers were during World War II targeted in any meaningful way by either US or Soviet forces. After the war, former members of the German armed forces, including Nazi Party members, served the new German state established by allied occupation forces at all levels.

In a particularly notable example Reinhard Gehlen, who achieved the rank of major general under Hitler and during the war headed German military intelligence on the eastern front, in 1956 went on to become the founding director of West Germany’s BND intelligence agency. He was considered the right man for the job after successfully recruiting numerous former Nazi Party members, including known SS and Gestapo officers, to collect intelligence and conduct operations during the early years of the Cold War. He was paid handsomely for this project by the US government, and subsequent documentation confirmed that the US and West German governments, at the most senior levels, were fully aware of who was involved in Gehlen’s organization and encouraged its work.

Syria’s current president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Muhammad al-Julani, joined Al-Qaeda in Iraq shortly after the 2003 US invasion and became a close associate of, and according to some reports the deputy to, its leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. As the Iraq branch of Al-Qaeda metamorphosed into the Islamic State of Iraq it appointed al-Sharaa as the movement’s commander in Iraq’s Nineveh governorate.

In 2011, at the beginning of the civil war in Syria, Al-Sharaa was ordered to his native Syria for the purpose of establishing an Al-Qaeda branch in the country. Weapons, funds, and men were supplied to the new organization by the IS leader in Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It is on this basis that the US government listed him as a Specially Designated Terrorist and put a price of USD 10 million on his head under its Rewards for Justice program.

Neither the terror designation nor the reward issued by the US were rescinded after al-Sharaa first broke with IS and then distanced himself from al-Qaeda, because the US also considered the successor organizations established by al-Sharaa, the Nusra Front and HTS, as transnational jihadist terror organizations.

Yet after al-Sharaa seized power in Damascus in December of last year, US officials resumed visiting Syria, met with al-him, and gave him a clean bill of health. It was only after al-Sharaa assumed leadership of Syria that Washington and the EU began the process of lifting crippling sanctions that had been imposed on the country as far back as the late 1970s. Earlier this year, it might be recalled, US President Donald Trump met al-Sharaa in Riyadh and heaped praise on him. And in June of this year the US according to Reuters gave “its blessing to a plan by Syria’s new leaders to incorporate thousands of foreign jihadist former rebel fighters into the [Syrian] national army”.

In other words, those who would claim it is legitimate to assassinate Anas al-Sharif if he was indeed a former combatant in Hamas’s Qassam Brigades are endorsing standards of warfare against Palestinians that were not even contemplated with respect to Nazi Germany during the twentieth century or in relation to al-Qaeda or the Islamic State movement in more recent years. More than anything else, this reveals the intensity of the campaign to demonize, dehumanize, and delegitimize Palestinians who ever take up arms against Israel, and the achievements of this campaign over the course of many decades.

Consider also that virtually every Israeli journalist has previously served in the Israeli military, that many continue to perform reserve duty, and that a number of them have seen active combat during the Gaza Genocide. Is their assassination while they’re wearing a press vest therefore also legitimate, or is this once again a case of one for the goose but another for the gander?

4. Anas al-Sharif was a member of Hamas: Israel has focused its campaign against Anas al-Sharif on his purported role and membership in Hamas’s Qassam Brigades. It hasn’t really sought to make the case that he was a member of the movement’s political or civilian wings.

The Bibi Si! has dutifully reported that it “understands Sharif worked for a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current conflict”, but it has neither named the team he purportedly worked for, nor provided any further let alone corroborating details, nor identified any source for its “understanding”.

As it stands, the report has less credibility than one asserting that Raffi Berg planted it as part of an Israeli disinformation campaign. In the event, “worked for a Hamas media team” doesn’t demonstrate affiliation with the movement, since – in what the Bibi Si! from its own experience surely knows – he could have been hired as a freelancer on the strength of his qualifications to perform a specific assignment. If the British broadcaster has any additional information – and as with all things Bibi Si! concerning Gaza and Hamas it is a big if – it is making a point of withholding it from us.

More concretely, Israel and its agitprop network have circulated a number of pictures of al-Sharif with Hamas leaders, including Ismail Haniyya, Yahya Sinwar, and Khalil al-Hayya. These have been seized upon by Israel flunkies as proof that al-Sharif was Khamas, was involved with the movement, and supported its actions. In a similar vein, social media posts attributed to al-Sharif praising the October 2023 Hamas attacks in southern Israel have also been circulated. On this basis the Hasbara Symphony Orchestra is not only claiming he was a legitimate target but is also widely celebrating his murder.

It is perhaps a function of human nature that people like to have their picture taken with celebrities, whether political leaders or cultural icons, and do so regardless of their own affiliation or that of those being sought out for selfies. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s recent attempt to cover her face while being photographed during a meeting with President Trump is in this respect not the norm, but rather the exception that proves the rule.

Journalists, who generally are in closer proximity to political leaders than others, are no different. It should also come as no surprise that they often develop a rapport with such leaders, regardless of their political affiliation. If nothing else, it’s a tool of the trade. In this respect it should also be noted that, with the exception of Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian leaders across the political spectrum are on the whole quite accessible to journalists, typically requiring little more than a phone call or an introduction from someone in their orbit to set up a meeting or interview.

In the case of Hamas, it has since 2007 functioned as the ruling authority in the Gaza Strip. Even most of those opposed to its rule did not engage in overt opposition to it unless they had compelling motivations to do so. As in any other political system, whether authoritarian or democratic, most people neither actively challenge those in power, tend to accept the legitimacy of those ruling them even if they oppose their policies, and if not don’t make a public display of it.

Whatever Anas al-Sharif’s views about Hamas, his affiliation with the movement or lack thereof, or for that matter his role in the development of Hamas’s nuclear weapons program and space force, images of him with Hamas leaders, in which he appears at ease and is smiling rather than screaming at them while running for the exit, don’t tell us much one way or the other. Alternatively, every other journalist on film enjoying an encounter with those ruling them is a confirmed member of the latter’s operation. Or is it only Palestinian journalists who get along with their leaders who should be marked for death, because grinning during a selfie is a capital offense?

Anas al-Sharif has of course repeatedly stated that he had no political affiliation, whether with Hamas or any other organization. That would place him squarely within the existing Palestinian political spectrum, where in recent decades “None of the Above” has become the largest constituency. Under normal circumstances, and given the paucity of evidence to the contrary, there would be no reason not to take his statements at face value.

An argument can of course be made that in the context of the Gaza Genocide and Israel’s demonstrated determination to kill every member of Hamas, including confirmed non-combatants, without distinction, he had every reason to conceal an affiliation with Hamas in order to remain alive. But to be taken seriously the argument requires not only assertion but also evidence. A selfie and a smile don’t quite lay the matter to rest.

Finally, there is the matter of al-Sharif’s social media posts. Their authenticity has been challenged on various grounds, but not definitively disproven. According to these posts, which are for the purposes of this discussion assumed to be genuine, he lauded the 7 October attacks while they were in progress.

As noted by Marc Owen Jones in a post on Twitter/X: “What really bothers me about those sharing Anas' comments on October 7th is [the] moralising. How should Palestinians react to a state that has oppressed, killed, starved, [and] humiliated them for decades? Kiss their feet? Give me a break and put yourself in their shoes for God's sake.”

To put it more crudely, what is so exceptional and objectionable about hatred of an occupier and expressions of support for attacks on them? Does one really have to be a member of the movement that carried out the attacks to endorse such attacks? A cursory review of history, whether in Palestine, the Middle East, or indeed the entire world demonstrates that support among the occupied for armed attacks on the occupying state typically extends far beyond the ranks of the movement conducting the attack. Were all those in Ireland who celebrated the 1916 Easter Rising and fervently prayed for its success affiliated with the Irish Republican Brotherhood?

If Anas al-Sharif had been celebrating the beheading of forty Israeli babies, the burning alive of Israeli children in ovens, and mass, systematic rapes of Israeli women on 7 October 2023 that would of course be a different matter. But he wasn’t, because these atrocities never transpired, and the lurid accounts of them were fabricated after the fact to prepare the ground for the Gaza Genocide that ensued.

Rather, if the social media posts are indeed authentic al-Sharif, like many Palestinians who have no involvement with Hamas or a record of support for the movement, was endorsing what he understood to be, and Israel has confirmed, was the most serious breach of Israel’s defences since the state was established in 1948.

Israel and its apologists consistently refer to the October 2023 Palestinian attacks on southern Israel as the largest killing of Jews since the Holocaust, as if the two events are somehow related. Palestinians by contrast view it as the most severe blow inflicted on the Israeli military, security services, and society since the Nakba, and place it in the context of nearly eight decades of Palestinian dispossession and six decades of Israeli military occupation – Israeli policies that have affected the Gaza Strip more intensively than anywhere else.

Similarly, one can heartily endorse the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam without specifically supporting the killing of civilians that accompanied it. The same applies to virtually every anti-colonial revolt of the past century, which typically have also included civilian casualties, in many cases deliberately so. It is in this respect telling that the one image al-Sharif is said to have posted on 7 October concerns an Israeli soldier who had been killed, not civilians shot dead at the Nova music festival.

It is of course true that many Palestinians have reached the point where they hold Israeli society as a whole responsible for their dispossession and misery, and as a result are indifferent to Israeli civilian casualties or even support targeting them. Anas al-Sharif may or may not have been among these.

The emphasis on al-Sharif’s purported expressions of support for the October 2023 attacks are not only intended to make the case that he was affiliated with Hamas, but also that such support, in and of itself, and even if he had no relationship with Hamas, justifies his assassination. Because we live in a world where any Palestinian who endorses resistance against Israel and its occupation has acquired the status of legitimate target. Decades of ceaseless demonization, dehumanization, and delegitimization that have sought to make “Palestinian”, “terrorist”, and more recently “jihadist” interchangeable terms, has reached its logical culmination. Cheerleaders for genocide, by contrast, are apparently entitled to their freedom of conscience and freedom of expression.

Long after it ceases to matter, we will acquire the necessary proof that Israel knowingly fabricated its dossier against Anas al-Sharif to furnish a pretext for his murder, and that the Hasbara Symphony Orchestra was simply playing the tune as directed by its conductor. It is an important point, because another feature of the world we live in is that in Israel’s case a crime remains speculative and unproven unless and until Israel itself furnishes conclusive evidence that it is indeed responsible. The 1948 Nakba, for example, and despite decades of research and documentation, did not become a widely accepted historical reality until after accounts by Israeli historians based on the Israeli archives during the late 1980s began confirming everything Palestinian historians like Walid Khalidi had been conclusively demonstrating since the 1950s.

How Israel prepared the ground for Anas al-Sharif’s murder is by contrast already coming to light. In yet another important scoop on 14 August 2025 by Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine, it emerges that the Israeli military has since October 2023 operated a unit known as the “Legitimization Cell”, which mobilized Israel’s intelligence services in the service of its propaganda campaign. Among this unit’s responsibilities was the effort to frame journalists as Hamas combatants rather than reporters.

In the words of one source who spoke to Abraham, ““The goal was simply to find as much material as possible to serve hasbara efforts.” In a response, “official security sources” stated to Abraham “that the goal was to ‘discredit’ journalists reporting on the war on broadcast networks”.

As reported by Sharif Kouddous and Abdel Qader Sabbah for Drop Site on 11 August 2025, the day after al-Sharif’s assassination:

Initially, Israeli forces would deny that they killed journalists or would claim their deaths were the unintended consequences of the war, clinically known as “collateral damage.” They eventually began to claim that some of the slain journalists were militants after they killed them, as was the case with Hamza al-Dahdouh in January 2024, and with Ismail al-Ghoul in July 2024, among others. None of the so-called evidence the Israeli military produced to back up these claims was close to credible, and in many cases, the evidence was outright ludicrous. After killing al-Ghoul, they released a document claiming that he had received a military ranking from Hamas in 2007, when al-Ghoul was 10 years old.

In October 2024, they went a step further and placed six Al Jazeera journalists on a hit list, including Al-Sharif, claiming they were militants while openly threatening them. Hossam Shabbat, a Drop Site contributor, was named on the list and assassinated in March. The following day, the Israeli military bragged about his killing and said, “Don’t let the press vest fool you.” In April, they admitted to bombing a hospital to kill journalist Hassan Eslaih, who was recovering from his wounds in a previous assassination attempt barely a month earlier in an airstrike on a media tent outside Nasser hospital that killed two other journalists.

Al-Sharif had been directly and repeatedly threatened by the Israeli military for many months. In November 2023, he reported receiving multiple calls from Israeli army officers ordering him to cease coverage and to leave northern Gaza. He said he also received messages and voice notes on WhatsApp from Israeli forces disclosing that they knew his location. Less than three weeks after he was called by the Israeli army, his family home in the Jabalia refugee camp was bombed, killing his 90-year-old father, Jamal al-Sharif. The threats only escalated from there, with the Israeli military spokesperson posting videos taunting him online.

On July 23, the Israeli military spokesperson reposted a video online accusing al-Sharif of being a member of Hamas’s military wing after he reported on the famine spreading in Gaza. Al-Sharif repeatedly called on the world to protect him and other journalists in Gaza. “After I reported live on civilians collapsing from hunger, I was directly targeted with public incitement by the army’s spokesperson,” he wrote three weeks ago. “This is an attempt to silence us—and to cover up a genocide unfolding in real time. I call on international officials, human rights defenders, and global media to speak out and share this message. Your voice can help stop the targeting of journalists and protect the truth.” He characterized Israel’s threats as “Silence or Death,” and he vowed not to be silent.

Judge for yourself.

Why Anas al-Sharif was murdered is the easiest part of the puzzle. If Sharif did indeed support Hamas and its actions, or was indeed affiliated with the movement, or did indeed serve as a commander in its military wing, Israel claims it already possessed and confirmed this information no later than mid-2024. Yet, in sharp contrast to the manner in which it has consistently acted since October 2023, including in numerous cases it asserts are identical to that of al-Sharif, Israel also felt it unnecessary to act on any of this with more than propaganda and threats. In other words, we can discount Israel’s proclaimed pretexts as hasbara or, should we choose to take them seriously, equally safely dismiss them as compelling explanations for the timing of al-Sharif’s assassination.

As Israel on 8 August announced a new offensive focused on Gaza City, and massively intensified its bombing and shelling of the city, it became imperative for the death squad state to remove from the scene the reporter based there who not only covered Israel’s genocidal campaign more extensively and in greater detail than others, but also had a massively larger audience for his reporting. Additionally, segments of his reports were also often featured on Al Jazeera English. The liquidation of the rest of the Al Jazeera Gaza City crew along with Anas al-Sharif two days after the Israeli cabinet decision was not a mistake or collateral damage, but rather pre-meditated or an added bonus.

Israel’s motives in murdering al-Sharif and the reasons for the timing of the assassination are as clear as daylight, and then some. Nevertheless, many will insist on keeping “an open mind” on the matter until Israel explicitly confirms the obvious or Israel’s own account of this episode is leaked.

As for Anas al-Sharif, he knew he was a marked man living on borrowed time. He was repeatedly informed he could save himself and live the remainder of his life unmolested if he just ceased reporting.

There is no indication Anas al-Sharif continued working because he did not trust Israel to make good on its offers, although healthy scepticism regarding anything Israel says is of course warranted.

Rather, his commitment to his people and to his profession compelled him to keep reporting the Gaza Genocide, and its impact upon Gaza City and its residents, even as he was fully aware and was repeatedly threatened that doing so would cost him his life.

Just twenty-eight years old, the father of two young children, and with his best years still ahead of him, it required extraordinary courage and commitment for Anas al-Sharif to persevere, to continue functioning 24/7 under extraordinarily difficult circumstances and in the knowledge that doing so meant certain death. This combination of courage, commitment, and professionalism is exceptionally rare, but Anas al-Sharif possessed it in abundance, and made it meaningful until his final breath.