On Wednesday, an X account belonging to Anas al-Sharif, a Palestinian journalist with more than half a million followers, announced a new mission: to be “the voice of Gaza resisting extermination, injustice, and betrayal … to keep the coverage ongoing.”
Four days earlier, Israel’s military had targeted and killed al-Sharif, an Al Jazeera correspondent, in a drone strike. Five other reporters also died in the strike, pushing the death toll among Palestinian journalists since the start of the U.S.-backed Israeli offensive in Gaza above 180. Their deaths have spurred global condemnation and driven concern about Israel limiting what the world knows about Gaza — where it is preparing to expand its campaign and where it has not allowed international journalists to report freely throughout the nearly two-year war — and fresh calls to prevent a total media blackout.
Al-Sharif “lived and died for Palestine, standing firm against the onslaught of rockets with resolve and dedication to the unwavering truth and to reporting his people’s struggles and suffering,” reads the X message. It suggests his accounts, potentially including his Instagram profile with nearly 2 million followers, are now being run by people to whom he entrusted them to ensure his community’s experiences continue to be documented.
But the assassination of al-Sharif points to how the global failure to respond to Israel’s repeated killings of Palestinian journalists have made it difficult to keep covering Gaza. Now, the war is entering potentially its darkest period, with Palestinians experiencing unprecedented starvation and more than a million facing yet another displacement because of Israeli military plans.
The United States’ military and diplomatic support for Israel give it the greatest potential leverage over Tel Aviv. Al-Sharif was arguably the best-known reporter still working in the strip.
“If Israel can kill the most prominent Gazan journalist, then it can kill anyone. The world needs to see these deadly attacks on journalists inside Gaza, as well as its censorship of journalists in Israel and the West Bank, for what they are: a deliberate and systematic attempt to cover up Israel’s actions,” Sara Qudah of the Committee to Protect Journalists argued in a statement.
Israeli officials claim al-Sharif was a fighter for the Palestinian militant group Hamas, whose deadly assault on Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023, initiated the current round of conflict. After his killing, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) released documents it said proved the assertion: They suggested al-Sharif joined in 2013 and was promoted in 2019, received a Hamas salary in 2023 and was included in a phone registry for one of the group’s brigades.
The IDF also later claimed some of the other journalists in the group were militants without providing evidence or details about which ones it meant. It has also controversially suggested Al Jazeera as a whole should be treated as pro-Hamas; both the channel and al-Sharif himself have forcefully denied he was part of the group, while observers have noted that many journalists from Israel and other nations have in the past been involved in military activity.
Annelle Sheline, a former official in the human rights bureau of the State Department, said Israel had demonstrated a pattern: “Officials would come out and make clear they had marked a particular journalist and were alleging they were a terrorist … and then within a matter of weeks or sometimes days they would target that journalist and somehow murder them.”
She tied the Israeli approach to the U.S. failure to rebuke the IDF over its past targeting of reporters, including an American citizen, Shireen Abu Akleh, in 2022. The IDF offered shifting explanations for Abu Akleh’s killing, first claiming she was hit by Palestinian fighters then suggesting the incident was accidental; no Israelis were held accountable, as has been the case for many IDF killings of reporters. American officials eventually endorsed the Israeli narrative even though U.S. personnel who investigated the site believed the shooting was intentional, according to a recent documentary from Zeteo.
“The Biden administration did nothing,” said Sheline. She worked at the State Department under President Joe Biden, who initiated huge U.S. military support for Israel’s war in Gaza, and told HuffPost she recalled concern among officials as the State Department spokesperson deflected repeated questions from American reporters about mounting casualties among their Palestinian colleagues.
Sheline eventually resigned from the Biden administration. Now a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft think tank, she told HuffPost she finds the pattern of continued impunity for Israel “particularly maddening” under President Donald Trump because at the start of his time in office, he successfully pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a truce with Hamas, including the exchange of some of the hostages captured on Oct. 7 for Palestinian prisoners.
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“He knows how to do it… so to then duck back into this Biden-like posture of [claiming] ‘We’re working tirelessly for a ceasefire’ is such bullshit,” Sheline said. “A lot of what Trump is doing is more extreme, especially going after dissent [against the war] for example, but a lot of those patterns started under Biden.”
The Trump administration seems unmoved by al-Sharif’s killing, with State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce telling reporters this week they discussed the matter with Israel and doubling down on the suggestion Palestinian reporters may be Hamas fighters in disguise. (She did not address why they would then repeatedly broadcast their exact locations; Trump recently promoted Bruce to be deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.) State this week released its annual human rights reports for countries around the world. The section on Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories largely deflected responsibility for violence there away from Israelis and suggested incidents of bloodshed are exceptional.
“During both the Biden and Trump administrations, the Israeli government has crossed every line imaginable in Gaza with impunity because the U.S. government has repeatedly refused to hold the Israeli military accountable,” John Ramming Chappell at the Center for Civilians in Conflict told HuffPost. “Every day, U.S. complicity in atrocities deepens.”
Israel has never, for instance, faced an American reprimand under the so-called Leahy laws, statutes intended to prevent foreign partners from committing major human rights abuses that have been applied to other nations close to Washington.
Americans’ awareness of their role in worsening conditions in Gaza appears to be growing, with a record number of senators voting on July 31 to block additional American weaponry for Israel. Mohammed Khaleel, an American doctor currently volunteering at a hospital in Gaza City — where al-Sharif was killed — told HuffPost he constantly feels a sense of culpability.
“One of our colleagues was like, ‘You’re here helping out, but you go back home and pay your taxes for the bombs,’” he said. Khaleel described how “a somber attitude befell everybody” as they learned of al-Sharif’s assassination, seeing it as both eliminating a key source of information about developments in the city and a precursor to bigger Israeli attacks.
Khaleel, on his third visit to Gaza amid the war, noted that his Palestinian colleagues had “lost so much weight” and were exhausted, particularly dreading casualties among aid-seekers who are regularly shot in approaching a new aid system supported by the American and Israeli governments.
“Things kept getting worse, but they have the patience to bear with it. They don’t have a lot they can do differently,” Khaleel told HuffPost of Palestinians living through the conflict.
