The killing of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif is shocking but that it is a culmination of planned mass assassination of journalists by the Israeli government is an outrage.
Since the beginning of the Gaza war the UN secretary-general reminds us that 242 journalists have been killed by the IDF – 13 journalists a month. According to Reporters Without Borders, the most deadly year for journalists covering the war was 2024 with more than 120 killed. The pace has not slackened: More than 50 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza this year.
Just how deliberate these deaths have been is borne out by statistics. Brown University’s Costs of War project calculates that more journalists had been killed in the Gaza war than in the US civil war, World War I, World War II, The Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the post-911, and the war in Afghanistan combined.
The impunity with which the Israeli Government has carried out the killing of Anas al-Sharif and his fellow journalists is chilling. The IDF openly admits to targeting and deliberately bombing the journalists’ tent. The charges levelled against Anas al-Sharif — the mainstay of Al Jazeera’s badly depleted reporting resources in Gaza — follow a well-worn playbook used by the IDF to eliminate hundreds of Gaza journalists.
That is, Anas al-Sharif is claimed to be a Hamas operative and involved in directing attacks against Israel. Those who have seen evidence provided by the IDF describe it as tissue-thin to the point of being patently absurd. Were there to be any validity in the charges, there is the so-far unanswered question as to why the IDF did not simply arrest these unarmed journalists — and those journalists likewise assassinated before him — to allow substantiation or refutation of the charges. Of course, were the charges to be refuted, the assassination could then be categorized as murder.
The immediate reasons for Sharif’s assassination are not hidden. It closely follows the Israeli Cabinet’s decision to direct a reluctant IDF to occupy the whole of the remaining areas of Gaza. As public opinion becomes more accepting that genocide is occurring, there is clearly no appetite for independent news sources in Gaza where thousands of more civilians are likely to be killed.
That the timing of the assassinations is not seen as a problem by Netanyahu, displays, very publicly, the extraordinary level of freedom of action which the US’ unqualified support of Isreal delivers. Under this protective umbrella, disregard for international public — and governmental — opinion has been brazen no more so than that residing in what Netanyahu has termed the “civilized” and democratic world which he risibly claims Israel is a bastion of.
Neither are the wider reasons for the assassination of Anas al-Sharif — and his fellow journalists — well obfuscated by the IDF. It is part of a systematic campaign to eradicate any independent reporting of the Gaza war. Since October 2023, journalists have been banned from the Gaza Strip with the IDF allowing only infrequent highly choreographed accompanied visits.
Left to report have been those Palestinians who chose to remain in Gaza since 7 October 2023 or who have been since recruited. It is these journalists — and, in particular, Anas al-Sharif — who the Israeli government has systematically set out to silence through a highly organized smear campaign of firstly threats, intimidation and lastly cold-blooded assassination.
Al Jazeera has been the focal point for these assassinations and Israel’s wider campaign to eradicate all hostile reporting from Gaza and anything like robust reporting of the Israeli government’s creeping annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Al Jazeera is targeted given it is the only mainstream news organization with global reach which had provided anything like unfiltered, extensive and intrusive coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. Its reporters have been openly describing the war in Gaza as genocide.
Perhaps inevitably then, all Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel and occupied territories were closed down in April 2024. The reasons offered were typically sensational, unproven and used the catch-all Hamas association accusation. Thus, Al Jazeera was found to be harming Israeli security and maintaining a close connection with Hamas. An Israeli court sealed the ban with the improbable finding that there was a “direct and causal connection” between individuals who carried out terror attacks inside Israel and the consumption of Al Jazeera content.
But a large remaining gap in Israel’s almost blanket ban on reporting from Gaza was Al Jazeera’s indigenous Palestinian resident reporters. Assassinations have now gone a long way to closing off that source. Much of what we receive on the Gaza war is therefore being put through a double filter – firstly by the heavy Israeli-engineered censorship and strangulation of independent news flows, and secondly by the self-censorship which the Jewish lobby has been able to have imposed on Western media. In this environment, it is all the more inexcusable that the systematic assassination of Gaza journalists has been so under-reported and has not led to an end to the egregiously imposed “management” of our own domestic reporting of the war.
Dr Webb is a former diplomat with postings in Indonesia, South Korea, Paris and New Zealand. In a former career as a journalist he was the economics writer for the Bulletin Magasine and Assistant Editor of Rydges Business Journal. He currently carries out research in the field of environmental economics at the Queensland University of Technology.
This is a republication from PEARLS & IRRITATIONS website at: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/08/where-is-the-outrage-israels-systematic-mass-assassination-of-journalists/?utm_source=Pearls+%26+Irritations&utm_campaign=a78a0e1a16-Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0c6b037ecb-a78a0e1a16-745128237
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