Murdering the Witnesses: Israel’s Assassination Campaign Against Palestinian Journalists

Israel massacred six journalists in Gaza City on Wednesday in an airstrike on a media tent outside Al-Shifa Hospital—an attack that sent shockwaves throughout Gaza and made headlines across the globe. The Israeli military publicly proclaimed the attack was a targeted assassination of renowned Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif.

Over the past 22 months, Israel has killed at least 238 journalists in Gaza, according to the Government Media Office, an unprecedented slaughter of journalists in modern history.

Al-Sharif was the most recognizable Palestinian journalist still alive and reporting from Gaza and had been openly targeted by the Israeli military for months. Killed alongside him were four of his Al Jazeera colleagues—Mohammed Qraiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Moamen Aliwa, and Mohammed Noufal—and Mohammed Al-Khalidi of the media outlet Sahat.

As the threats against al-Sharif escalated, he penned a letter in April to be published upon his death. “If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice,” he wrote. “I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification—so that Allah may bear witness against those who stayed silent, those who accepted our killing, those who choked our breath, and whose hearts were unmoved by the scattered remains of our children and women, doing nothing to stop the massacre that our people have faced for more than a year and a half.”

Western media institutions have, for the most part, remained largely silent or actively enabled the killing of their Palestinian colleagues in record numbers by parroting ludicrous claims by the Israeli military labelling journalists in Gaza as militants and terrorists.

On this week’s Drop Site News livestream, Jeremy Scahill and Sharif Abdel Kouddous speak with Emmy and Peabody Award–winning Al Jazeera English journalist and documentary producer Laila al-Arian about the killing of Palestinian journalists in Gaza and western media coverage of the genocide.

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