The Washington Post described Anas Al-Sharif, an Al Jazeera reporter who was killed by the IDF on Monday in Gaza, as “perhaps the most recognizable face and voice of the past 22 months of war, with a near-constant on-air presence from Gaza’s hard-hit north.”
The BBC described how he was married with two small children and “separated from them for long stretches during the war while he continued to report from the north of the territory after refusing to follow Israeli evacuation orders.”
The Israeli government, however, described Sharif as a Palestinian Hamas terrorist – a senior rocket cell commander who hid behind a “PRESS” vest, working as an Al Jazeera journalist while being on Hamas’s payroll.
Intelligence documents reveal two truths: he was, in fact, a jihadi terrorist on Hamas’s payroll and was embedded within the Qatari Al Jazeera network. His press badge was a cover; his real job – launching rockets at Israeli civilians and IDF troops.
Those are the two disparate versions of how differently much of the world sees Sharif as compared to Israel– and it’s a microcosm of how differently much of the world and Israel see the war in Gaza.
It’s always a tragedy when a journalist is killed in a war zone. In this instance, the IDF targeted Sharif, who was killed along with reporter Mohammed Qureiqa and cameramen Ibrahim Thaher, Mohammed Noufal, and Moamen Aliwa, all of whom worked for Al Jazeera Arabic, the network’s Arabic-language news channel. The network called it a “blatant and premeditated attack on press freedom.”
Accusations against Israel
Naturally, in addition to Al Jazeera, other bodies, including journalist associations around the world and our friends at the UN, accused Israel of targeting Sharif not because he was an active terrorist, but because he was a journalist.
That timing made the strike on Sharif a “convenient killing,” said Irene Khan, the UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression. “If something comes out in Al Jazeera, people believe it; it’s credible,” she said in an interview on Monday. “I see this killing as a very clear strategy.”
But what if the journalist is also a terrorist, or belongs to a terror group? And what if the media organization he works for promotes and supports terrorism?
According to IDF international spokesman Lt.-Col. Nadav Shoshani, Sharif was the head of a Hamas terrorist cell and conducted advanced rocket attacks on Israeli civilians and troops.
Prior to the strike, the military “obtained current intelligence indicating that al-Sharif was an active Hamas military wing operative at the time of his elimination. In addition, he received a salary from the Hamas terror group and terrorist supporters, Al-Jazeera, at the same time.”
The evidence seems irrefutable. Sharif may have been a journalist, but he was also a Hamas member. And as such, given his euphoric social media posts on October 7, 2023, praising the Hamas massacre of innocent Israelis, he wasn’t an objective bystander – he was an enemy of Israel. Putting a “press” sticker on his shirt doesn’t give him immunity.
The disclosures about Sharif put Al Jazeera in an even darker light than it found itself in last year when Israel banned the media network from having offices and broadcasting from the country.
However, Israel isn’t alone in being suspicious of the Qatar-funded network. No less than The New York Times, in a Tuesday report on Al Jazeera, acknowledged it, writing that “in 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain all banned Al Jazeera amid a diplomatic spat with Qatar. Along with Egypt, the countries had accused Al Jazeera of backing terror groups.”
Even the Palestinian Authority has outlawed the network, which has no credibility, either inside or outside the Arab world.
Instead of condemning Israel, journalists' associations and human rights organizations should be demanding that Al Jazeera stop employing terrorists in their midst. Its policy of doing so puts bona fide journalists in grave danger.
The issue of whether the military benefits of eliminating al-Sharif outweigh the international pummeling Israel has taken as a result of it is something the army and the government will have to grapple with.
However, to accuse Israel of deliberately targeting journalists and ignoring al-Sharif’s Hamas connection is being disingenuous – but not surprising.