“If my words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice.”

This is the opening line in a posthumous post on the social media pages of the Al Jazeera reporter, Anas al-Sharif, shared just hours after the 28-year-old husband and father of two was targeted in a strike on a tent at the front of Al-Shifa hospital on Sunday night. 

For the best part of two years, al-Sharif was the eyes and ears for the world in Gaza, mirroring back to us the horrors of Israel’s assault on the strip from the frontlines. 

But he was not alone on Sunday, and he was not the only journalist killed. Al-Sharif was killed along with four colleagues: the reporter Mohammed Qreiqeh, cameramen Ibrahim Zaher and Moamen Aliwa, and their assistant Mohammed Noufal. A freelancer, Mohammad al-Khaldi, was also killed in the strike.

The entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City was taken out in one go in what the Al Jazeera Media Network has condemned as a “targeted assassination”.

But Al Jazeera does not need to tell us that the reporters were targeted. 

The Israel Defence Forces already did that on Sunday night, taking pride in killing al-Sharif based on baseless accusations of a militant background, described by the Committee to Protect Journalists as an “Israeli military smear campaign”.

Al-Sharif had a target on his back for over a year, one of many Palestinian journalists whom the Israeli authorities have routinely accused of being members of Hamas.

This ramped up when he went viral on social media in recent weeks, finally faltering on camera, the reporter’s hard exterior pulled back, breaking down during a live broadcast as people dropped like flies around him, exhausted from the starvation inflicted on Gaza by Israel’s blockage of aid entering the enclave.

As he collected himself on camera, a voice of a passerby is heard in the background: “Continue the coverage. You are our voices.” This is the real reason he was targeted. 

It was not an image that the Israeli authorities wanted on their screens as Western leaders started to turn the screw, if only ever so slightly, on the Israeli government over the news and images of starvation coming out of Gaza. His was no longer a voice they wanted speaking to the world about what is happening in Gaza day in, day out. 

Yet, al-Sharif refused to leave. On Sunday night, a media colleague in Gaza, Mohammed Haniya, shared a recent message exchange between the pair. In the text thread, he implored al-Sharif to leave Gaza for his own safety. “I won’t leave Gaza unless it’s to heaven,” was the reply. 

He follows this path alongside many colleagues. 

A report out in April this year from Brown University’s Costs of War project describes Gaza as a “news graveyard” where Israel has killed more journalists than those killed in both World Wars, Vietnam, the Balkans, and Afghanistan combined. 

The CPJ’s latest estimate is that close to 180 journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. By the UN Human Rights office’s latest count, this figure is at 242 journalists and media workers, including support personnel such as translators, drivers and fixers.

One of them, as I wrote earlier this year, was Hossam Shabat, the 23-year-old Al Jazeera journalist killed in a targeted drone strike in April whose fate is eerily similar to that of al-Sharif’s. 

Both were young, popular and brave Al Jazeera reporters who, together, became the faces of the frontline in Gaza City. Shabat, too, was threatened by the IDF but refused to leave. 

When the ceasefire was broken by Israel in March, he put his press vest on to go back to the frontline, just days after seeing his mother for the first time in 15 months.

In a final message to the public, also written in case he was killed in the line of duty, Shabat asked the world to keep speaking about Gaza. “Do not let the world look away,” he wrote. 

Outrage is not enough

Across social media, the public and many reporters are not looking away in the last 24 hours, pouring their hearts out over al-Sharif’s killing, as they did with Shabat. This is not simply some case of a parasocial relationship with celebrity personalities. 

Both young reporters have earned the greatest levels of respect possible from any other reporter worth their salt. They literally put their bodies on the line to become our eyes and ears in Gaza as foreign media remain banned from entering the strip by Israel.

Palestinian journalists have continued to report even as family members are killed, as they bury colleague after colleague, and, more recently, as their bodies began to shut down from the enforced starvation.

There is frustration among some reporters that Western leaders are largely silent on the deaths of Palestinian reporters, normally only popping their heads up, if at all, to condemn the injuring or killing of more well-known faces on the frontline. 

But there is also much anger aimed at Western media outlets and reporters who have been tellingly silent on the killing of Palestinian colleagues in unprecedented numbers. 

The frustration came through clearly in a post from the former Al Jazeera editor and Reuters producer, Barry Malone, who has been vocally critical of Western reporting on Gaza. 

“If you’re a Western journalist who hasn’t spoken up while more than 200 of your colleagues have been slaughtered then just keep Anas’s name out of your mouth,” he wrote. “We’re not interested anymore. It’s too late.”

Parroting false narratives

Malone is not alone in his ire, nor is the ire unwarranted. Western media continues to parrot Israeli narratives in reporting, despite everything that has happened over the last 21 months, and multiple examples of Israeli authorities being caught in a web of lies, more notable recently in Israel’s shifting narratives over the killings of eight medics in March, found buried in a mass grave near Rafah.  

The same is true of much of the reporting around al-Sharif’s assassination in the last 24 hours. On the more extreme end, Bild, Germany’s best-selling newspaper, had a headline that parroted the IDF’s lines, describing al-Sharif as a terrorist disguised as a journalist. 

Bild is a right-leaning tabloid known for its sensational headlines. However, many respected leading English-language publications, including the BBC, Sky News and our own Irish Times, have all essentially parroted the claims, not as an endnote to articles, but in headlines, at the top of broadcasts, and prominently in articles.

If media organisations feel the need to include this detail, why does it need to feature so prominently, especially when there is so much evidence and internationally respected voices stacked up against the propaganda narrative? 

Irene Khan, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, has already said that there is “growing evidence” journalists in Gaza have been “targeted and killed by the Israeli army on the basis of unsubstantiated claims that they were Hamas terrorists”.

Sara Qudah, a director at the Committee to Protect Journalists, has said that “Israel’s pattern of labelling journalists as militants without providing credible evidence raises serious questions about its intent and respect for press freedom”. 

An investigation from Reporters Without Borders found that the documents produced by the IDF last year claiming to show links between al-Sharif and Shabat and Hamas “severely lacked proof” and noted “numerous inconsistencies” in the purported evidence put forward by Israel.

And why do they not include the basic fact that journalists and media workers are protected under the Geneva Conventions? They are civilians, regardless of any political or state affiliations of broadcasters they work for, meaning that the deliberate killing of journalists is a war crime.

Lacking this context in reporting only helps to perpetuate the idea that the Western media doesn’t care a damn about Palestinians. It is an argument that is becoming increasingly hard to argue against.

This is how truth is silenced

For those of us who do give a damn, with each colleague killed in Gaza, every day at this job becomes that much harder; every story not about Gaza is more difficult to tell. 

For those who knew Anas al-Sharif, his colleagues, and the hundreds of media professionals killed in Gaza since October 2023, life itself gets a bit darker each day, amid what is already a world of daily miseries. 

As the Palestinian photojournalist Abdulruhman Ismail eloquently and heartbreakingly wrote on social media just hours after news broke of the killing of Anas, “the world turned dark”. 

“You’ve become the news, a headline needing no words, an image never shown. This is how truth is silenced: by killing the voice that spoke it, and blinding the eye that saw it.”

This is what Israel seeks to achieve with each reporter whose voice they snuff out from the world. And so long as the Western political and media class allow this to continue, they will achieve it.