On Sunday, when Al-Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif was killed along with five of his colleagues in a direct Israeli airstrike outside Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital, the Israeli army did not deny targeting him. On the contrary, they confirmed and celebrated the killing.

“Al-Sharif was the head of a Hamas terrorist cell and advanced rocket attacks on Israeli civilians and IDF troops,” the Israeli army posted shortly after the strike. “Intelligence and documents from Gaza, including rosters, terrorist training lists and salary records, prove he was a Hamas operative integrated into Al Jazeera.”

Israel’s smear of Gazan journalists as Hamas is one of its oldest tricks to silence, delegitimize, and intimidate Palestinian voices, or justify their killing at a rate unprecedented in modern history. I know because I have seen it play out dozens of times.

During Gaza’s Great March of Return protests in 2018, after an Israeli sniper shot and killed Palestinian journalist Yasser Murtaja in his press vest, Israeli officials labeled him a “Hamas operative.” We then learned Murtaja was actually detained and beaten up by Hamas in 2015, and that his media company had been vetted and received a grant from the U.S. government. Israel then said it would investigate his death — and seven years later, that’s the last we heard of the story.

Or in 2019, just days before the general elections in the United Kingdom, Gazan journalist Walid Mahmoud was smeared across Israeli media as a Hamas operative who was running an “influential Facebook page” in support of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. In reality, Mahmoud had been openly critical of the militant group — even having once been jailed by them — and had been added to the unofficial fan page to post sporadic updates about Gaza.

Mahmoud began to fear for his life, and reached out to different media outlets to clear his name. But as soon as the UK elections were over, the original article alleging his membership in Hamas disappeared. No clarification, no apology, nothing: that’s how easy it was for Israel to manufacture a hoax out of thin air and tarnish a Gazan journalist.

From the first weeks after October 7, Israel systematically sought to link Palestinian journalists to Hamas to justify its genocidal war in Gaza, even suggesting that many of the enclave’s most prominent journalists — including Hassan Aslih, AP’s Ali Mahmud, and Mohammed Abu Mostafa from Reuters — had foreknowledge of the attacks or were “embedded with Hamas” during them. Israeli ministers called for deeming those journalists “terrorists” and dealing with them accordingly. 

HonestReporting, the shady Israeli media advocacy group that initially made these allegations, went on to tie many other journalists to Hamas, among them Hind Khoudary, Abdel Qader Sabbah, CBS’ Marwan Al-Ghoul, and Ashraf Abu Amra with the AP and Reuters.

And over the course of the war, Israel’s government has gone after journalists like Ismail Al-Ghoul, Samer Abudaqa, Talal Aruki, Alaa Salama, Hossam Shabat, Ismail Abu Omar, and Ashraf Saraj, claiming they were Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives without any solid evidence.

Therefore, it’s entirely unsurprising that Israel would now say the same about Anas Al-Sharif. The claim of affiliation with Palestinian militant groups is a tried-and-true smear, one that the Israeli military has invested considerable resources to deploy against Palestinian journalists. 

Yesterday, +972 Magazine’s Yuval Abraham revealed that the Israeli set up a “Legitimization Cell” after October 7 to find Gazan journalists that could be portrayed as Hamas operatives in disguise, and in turn, help justify the army’s actions in Gaza. “The goal was simply to find as much material as possible to serve hasbara efforts,” one intelligence source said.

Israel’s allegations about Al-Sharif rely on the same three tactics used to legitimize the killing of dozens of his colleagues: producing documented “proof” of their membership in a militant organization, photographs of them with Hamas or other factional leaders, or screenshots of controversial statements from their social media history or published work.

Documented ‘evidence’

The first step is often to release vague snippets of documents Israeli officials claim as evidence of reporters’ membership in a militant group like Hamas or Islamic Jihad. When Israel killed Al Jazeera journalist Hamza Al-Dahdouh in Khan Younis in January 2024, the army released one such document and suggested he was flying a drone to survey the locations of Israeli troops. Two months later, a Washington Post investigation debunked those claims.

In July of the same year, after a targeted Israeli airstrike killed Al Jazeera correspondent Ismail Al-Ghoul and his cameraman Rami Al-Rifi in Gaza, the military released a screenshot of a file allegedly “found on Hamas computers seized in the Gaza Strip,” arguing it proved Al-Ghoul was “an engineer in the Hamas Gaza brigade.” Among several glaring inconsistencies in the army’s allegations was the fact that the screenshot showed that Al-Ghoul had received a military rank in July 2007 — when he was just 10 years old.

In the case of Al-Sharif, Israel released three documents that contradict each other. One, dated 2023, lists him as a “combatant” with his status described as “suspended” and “unassigned.” It highlights that he suffered incapacitating injuries in a training explosion that left him with “extremely weak hearing in the left ear, weak eyesight” and constant migraines and headaches. 

Another from 2019 describes Al-Sharif as a “group leader” but lists his 17th birthday as the day he joined Hamas, despite the minimum age for membership being 18. And a third undated document suggests Al-Sharif was a member of Hamas’ Nukhba unit, the most elite combat division of the Al-Qassam brigades. But it is nearly impossible that someone with incapacitating injuries could join this unit, or would have previously been a member and then demoted to a foot soldier.

If Al-Sharif was part of Hamas, why did Israel release him after detaining and interrogating him in al-Shifa hospital, per Israeli journalist Amit Segal? Or why wasn’t he taken out earlier? For 22 months, Al-Sharif lived in the open, reported from the streets of Gaza, slept in tents in public spaces, and had his phone on him at all times — a far cry from the behavior of a dangerous militant, who would who would be under strict orders to operate under the radar.

As veteran U.S. journalist Ryan Grim put it, “The idea that someone would ‘pose’ as a journalist by doing live reporting all day, every day, for two straight years — but is actually secretly a terrorist (when??) — is so stupid it demonstrates how much power Israel believes it has.”

Even if Al-Sharif previously participated in militant activities, of which Israel presents absolutely no credible proof, this would not make him a permissible target years later. Until 2023, Israeli journalist Barak Ravid was a reservist in the Israeli army. Nitzan Shapira was injuredin combat in Lebanon while simultaneously working for Israel’s Channel 12.

As +972’s Yuval Abraham noted, by Israel’s own logic, “the vast majority of journalists in Israel, if there’s some document showing they served in the army or did reserve duty at some point, would be legitimate targets for elimination.”

Incriminating selfies

Israel’s second tactic to justify killing Gazan journalists is to declare them guilty by association, releasing pictures of them next to Hamas leaders or militants. They did this with photojournalist Hassan Aslih after bombing him twice — once in his tent and another in his bed at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, where he died this May. They are now doing it with Anas Al-Sharif.

Needless to say, a photograph with Hamas officials is no evidence of formal ties to the group and does not render anyone a legitimate target — especially journalists, who often take pictures to document their access to prominent figures, including non-state armed actors. Italian journalist Francesca Borri stood shoulder to shoulder next to Yahia Sinwar. In 2019, Fox News’ Trey Yingst was pictured with armed Hamas militants on a pickup truck. The late Jamal Khashoggi posed for pictures with Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan, carrying an RPG.

The military wing of Hamas, al-Qassam Brigades, speaks with Fox News today in a rare on-camera interview.

In the background a song played in Arabic saying “we will launch more rockets and we will engulf Israel in flames.” pic.twitter.com/u2E8iwJedX

— Trey Yingst (@TreyYingst) November 11, 2019

In Gaza, journalism is a large and widely competitive field, as one of the very few professions to offer a decent living from clients outside Gaza. One common way of getting noticed and advancing one’s career is posing for pictures next to politicians, and for Gazan journalists, the overwhelming majority of whom have never stepped a foot outside the enclave, Hamas officials are the only public figures they can be photographed with.

And even if Al-Sharif personally supported Hamas, it would not make it lawful to target and kill him, as the president of the Foreign Press Association recently argued.

To the contrary, Al-Sharif expressed views strongly critical of Hamas on multiple occasions. In December 2024, he recorded a voice note blaming Hamas’ negotiators for “our Nakba” in Gaza, demanding that Hamas reach a ceasefire deal even if it meant handing over themselves and all the hostages to Israel. In April, he reposted a colleague calling Hamas rockets “ill-considered behavior, neither morally nor nationally wise.” And last month, he called on Hamas to get a ceasefire deal “by any means, now.” 

Lethal screenshots

Israel’s third tactic to delegitimize Gazan journalists and justify their killing is to publish out-of-context screenshots from their social media history or work. This could be a bad tweet, a poorly worded message, a controversial opinion, a message of support for armed resistance — anything to dehumanize them as acceptable targets, regardless of any direct ties to Hamas.

When Israel killed Gazan poet Refaat al-Areer in an airstrike in November 2023, the army never even alleged he was part of Hamas. Instead, Israeli mouthpieces flooded the internet with a screenshot of a Tweet he wrote mocking the debunked claim of Hamas burning infants in ovens on October 7.

Pro-Israel activists did the same with Yasser Murtaja, and now with Anas Al-Sharif and several of the remaining journalists in Gaza. A Telegram message attributed to Al-Sharif’s account reads “9 hours and the heroes are still roaming the country, killing and capturing.” The message, which appears completely inconsistent with Al-Sharif’s posting history on or after the events of October 7, was deleted soon after it was published.

Many of Al-Sharif’s news updates on that day were copied and re-posted from other groups, chat rooms, or news sites. This means that the statement could have been an accidental post that he deleted as soon as he was made aware of it.

It goes without saying that a message like this, even if it does reflect Al-Sharif’s own views,  does not justify his murder. It also doesn’t imply support for atrocities or war crimes. Many of the early reports about that fateful day describe Israeli soldiers killed or captured, military installations wrecked, and police stations taken over. Even Fatah leaders expressed support for this military aspect of the attack. At the time when Al-Sharif wrote this post, the declared death toll in Israel was only 70, while 190 Gazans had already been killed in Israeli airstrikes on the enclave.

As a European politician put it to me, “Europeans revel in Russian military losses, and once did the same with German or Soviet defeats, and never hesitated to cheer the humiliation of enemies, real or imagined. But when Palestinians display the same perfectly ordinary human emotions toward those who have dispossessed, bombed, and immiserated them for decades, it’s treated as incomprehensible pathology.”

At an even more basic level, Al-Sharif shouldn’t have to be a perfect human being to earn his right to live. Western mainstream media is full of warmongering journalists with controversial opinions, and many Israeli journalists and politicians have made openly genocidal statements on national TV and social media. Assassinating them would still be a war crime.

International law divides people in war zones into only two groups; either a combatant engaged in hostilities or a noncombatant, and the latter is never a target. Al-Sharif was a serious journalist who refused to abandon his profession, staying in northern Gaza during its most difficult period of siege, incessant bombardment and forced expulsion. He should still be alive today.

An assault on accountability

But beyond Israel’s justifications for killing Al-Sharif, the timing of his assassination has raised alarms. Many experts have seen it as a precursor to Israel’s planned major assault on Gaza City, which may very likely see the enclave’s largest remaining urban space occupied, depopulated, and flattened.

Al-Sharif and his murdered colleagues were some of the last active journalists in northern Gaza. By silencing them, Israel has effectively created a media blackout ahead of what is expected to be its bloodiest invasion this year.

Israel’s targeted assassination of Gaza’s most prominent journalists also aims to intimidate their peers on the ground, as well as encourage victims of Israeli violence to refrain from speaking to the media. My colleagues in Gaza have been telling me for months how it has been getting increasingly difficult to interview survivors, who are fearful of Israeli retaliation if they speak up. 

More critically, Israel’s record-breaking killing of Palestinian journalists has a longer-term goal: the destruction of first-person testimony and evidence of its war crimes. Journalists in Gaza are often first at the sites of atrocities, mapping out attacks and reaching victims and witnesses. Silencing them eliminates vast troves of incriminating information.

The killing of Anas al-Sharif is the latest chapter in a deliberate, years-long Israeli campaign to erase the witnesses, silence the narrators, and blind the world to Gaza’s reality. By smearing journalists as militants, Israel manufactures a false pretext for their deaths, then buries the truth alongside their bodies. This is not merely an attack on individuals; it is an assault on the very possibility of accountability. 

Remove Gaza of its reporters and you do not just remove its voice — you destroy the record of its suffering. And without that record, impunity becomes permanent.