Anas Al-Sharif One Year Later: The Systematic Killing of Palestine’s Journalists by Michael Leonardi

 

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Art by Gianluca Costantini

One year ago this week, the Israeli military killed Anas Al-Sharif. He was a young Palestinian journalist working in Gaza, one of the many who continued to report under bombardment, displacement, and the constant knowledge that the camera itself had become a target. His death was not an accident of war. It was one act in the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza — a genocide that has included, as a deliberate and central component, the systematic elimination of those who document it.

Al-Sharif’s killing joins a list that has grown so long it has become a statistic rather than a series of individual lives. Since October 2023, more close to three hundred Palestinian and now Lebanese journalists and media workers have been killed by Israeli forces. The Committee to Protect Journalists documents at least 209 killed by Israel in Gaza and in Israeli detention centres. Palestinian press associations and the International Federation of Journalists put the figure higher, in the mid-to-high 260s. These were not combatants. They were reporters, camera operators, producers, and fixers — many of them wearing clearly marked press vests, working for local outlets or international networks, trying to show the world what was happening to their cities, their schools, their mosques, their hospitals, and their families as the genocide unfolded.

This is not merely the deadliest conflict for journalists in the modern era. According to analyses from Brown University’s Costs of War project, more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in the U.S. Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including Cambodia and Laos), the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan — combined. The comparison is not rhetorical flourish. It is a measure of the scale of a genocidal campaign that has treated the press as an enemy to be erased. What took place across the major industrial wars of the twentieth century, across continents and decades, has been surpassed in a single strip of land in less than three years. That fact alone should end any pretence that these deaths are the ordinary hazards of covering combat.

Among the dead is Shireen Abu Akleh, the American-Palestinian journalist for Al Jazeera, shot in the head by an Israeli soldier in Jenin in May 2022 — more than a year before the onset of the current genocide in Gaza. She was wearing a helmet and a press vest while covering a military raid. Her killing was captured on video. Investigations by independent outlets and human rights organizations concluded that she was deliberately targeted. The Israeli government first claimed she was killed by Palestinian fire, then shifted stories, and ultimately faced no meaningful accountability. Her targeted killing was an early and clear signal of the policy that would later be applied on a mass scale as part of the genocide: the press is the enemy.

Photograph Source: Davide Mauro – CC BY-SA 4.0

The pattern is consistent with the logic of genocide. Journalists are killed in their homes with their families, in marked press cars, while live-streaming from hospital courtyards, while sheltering in media offices that Israeli officials had been informed were civilian. Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau was repeatedly struck. Local reporters who remained after international staff were evacuated became the primary chroniclers of the mass killing, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and the forced starvation of the population — and therefore the primary targets. Israel’s repeated claim that it does not target journalists is contradicted by the body count, by the documented strikes on known media locations, and by the statements of Israeli officials who have treated the Palestinian press as a legitimate military objective within a broader campaign of destruction.

Yet some have survived the same violence and refused to stop. Wael Al-Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s long-time Gaza bureau chief, lost his wife, two of his children, his infant grandson, and later his eldest son Hamza — himself a journalist — in successive Israeli strikes. He was injured more than once. Within days of burying family members he returned to the camera. “If we don’t continue reporting,” he has said, “there will be no one left to tell the story.” Even after leaving Gaza for medical treatment, he has continued to speak for the colleagues still inside. Others who narrowly escaped the August 2025 strike that killed Anas Al-Sharif and four of his colleagues — among them Ayman al-Hassi, Mohammed Qita, and Anas’s cousin Mohammed al-Sharif — returned to the same work. Younger reporters such as Nour Khaled stepped into the gap left by the dead, choosing to remain in Gaza City rather than evacuate, insisting that the coverage must continue.

These survivors operate under conditions that would be unimaginable in any other context: no safe shelter, no reliable electricity, chronic hunger, and the knowledge that the next airstrike may be aimed at them specifically. Freelancers without institutional protection, local stringers, and the remaining staff of networks that still broadcast from Gaza keep documenting the genocide because no one else can. Their persistence is itself a form of resistance against the attempt to erase the record.

This is a genocidal attack on freedom of the press, inseparable from the genocide itself. When a state kills the people who record its actions at a rate that exceeds the combined toll of the great wars of the twentieth century, it is not simply committing war crimes against individuals. It is attempting to erase the possibility of an independent historical record of the genocide. The images that did get out — of children pulled from rubble, of mass graves, of hospitals turned into morgues — were produced at extraordinary personal cost. Many of the journalists who filmed them are now dead. Those who remain keep working.

The names of those killed are not abstract. They are maintained and updated by Palestinian institutions themselves. The Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate (نقابة الصحفيين الفلسطينيين), working in close coordination with the International Federation of Journalists, has published sequential lists of the martyred journalists and media workers. A public, regularly updated record of the killings can be found on the IFJ’s dedicated page for the war in Gaza, which draws directly from the Syndicate’s documentation. Additional named lists and ongoing monitoring are available through the Shireen Observatory (مرصد شيرين) at https://www.shireen.ps, a Palestinian project dedicated to documenting attacks on journalists. These are the primary Palestinian sources for the identities of those silenced.

Last week in New York City, like in many places across the world, demonstrators marked the one-year anniversary of Anas Al-Sharif’s killing. Organized in part by the Palestinian Youth Movement, the march moved from the New York Times building to Times Square, demanding accountability for the journalists killed in Gaza and spotlighting Western media’s role in manufacturing consent for the ongoing genocide. Among those present was Palestinian American activist Roland Bennett, president of the Tree Water Initiative, a non profit dedicated to supporting sustainable life in Gaza. “Remembering Anas means refusing to let the record be buried,” Bennet said. “Every journalist still reporting from Gaza is carrying the weight of those who can no longer speak. Our task is to make sure the world cannot look away.”

The international response has been a mixture of muted statements and continued arms transfers. Western governments that speak of press freedom at home have remained largely silent about the industrial-scale killing of Palestinian journalists as part of the genocide. The same governments that demanded accountability when journalists were killed in Ukraine have found reasons for caution when the perpetrators are their close ally. The double standard is not subtle. It is structural.

Anas Al-Sharif was one name among hundreds. His colleagues continue to report from the ruins. Their work is an act of resistance against both the genocide itself and the attempt to erase its documentation. One year after his death, the least that can be demanded is that the record remain unbroken: these killings were not tragic accidents of a complex war. They were the systematic targeting of the people who refused to look away — a campaign so extensive that it has outstripped the journalist death tolls of World War I, World War II, and the major conflicts of the modern era combined, and one that forms an integral part of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The silence of the powerful is part of the crime. The work of the remaining journalists who seek to expose the truth is its contradiction and a part of the resistance to these unfathomable and ongoing atrocities continuing to happen before our eyes.

Michael Leonardi lives in Italy and can be reached at michaeleleonardi@gmail.com