Anas Al-Sharif, a 28-year-old reporter for Al Jazeera Arabic, was killed Sunday in an Israeli airstrike on a journalists’ tent outside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City — just minutes after posting videos of heavy bombardment on X. His final post read: “Relentless bombardment. For two hours, the Israeli aggression has intensified on Gaza City.”
The Israeli military alleged that Al-Sharif led a Hamas cell responsible for advancing rocket attacks against civilians and IDF troops. Al Jazeera strongly rejected the claim, accusing Israel of conducting a “campaign of incitement” against its reporters since the start of the war. The network said such accusations were a “dangerous attempt to justify targeting journalists.”
Al-Sharif, a graduate of Al-Aqsa University’s Faculty of Media, was a prominent voice from northern Gaza and won Palestine’s Best Young Journalist Award in 2018. In July, Israeli spokesperson Avichay Adraee publicly accused him of belonging to Hamas’s armed wing — a charge the journalist and Al Jazeera denied.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) previously warned that Al-Sharif had been targeted before and urged international protection for him. His death adds to the growing toll of media workers killed in the ongoing conflict.
Al Jazeera has called for accountability and reiterated its demand for the safety of journalists reporting from war zones.