Palestinian reporters are being murdered before their own cameras to expose true horrors to an indifferent or even pro-genocidal world.

Let this column be a tribute to slain Al Jazeera journalists and technicians Anas al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa, and independent journalist Mohammed al-Khaldi. They were deliberately murdered by the Israeli military in a surgical strike on Sunday.

Besides being an Al Jazeera star reporter, Sharif was part of a Reuters team that won a Pulitzer Prize last year. They defied death for almost two years to bring heartbreaking news to an indifferent or even pro-genocidal world.

They represent the bravest and most honourable of what our mostly sordid and miserable profession has to offer.

At the opposite end are those who produced such mendacious headlines and stories, from the most respected Anglo-American newspapers: “Israel has killed a prominent Al Jazeera correspondent it accuses of leading a Hamas terror cell in Gaza.”

“Israel killed five Al Jazeera journalists in airstrike, network says. Israel accused Anas al-Sharif, one of Gaza’s most prominent journalists, of heading a Hamas cell.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists warned last month of “acute danger” to Sharif after the Israeli military claimed he was a Hamas fighter, which Reporters sans frontieres and CPJ dismissed as baseless. Irene Khan, the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, denounced the Israeli threat.

Somehow, every Palestinian killed, even a baby, was because Hamas was hiding behind or under them, or they were part of Hamas themselves.

I prefer to state the obvious: a deliberate massacre of a trapped civilian population, day in and day out, for almost two years.

Israel has barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza. But over many years, Palestinians themselves have trained many professional journalists and writers. People like Sharif and his slain colleagues are much more dangerous and damaging by broadcasting Israeli war crimes and atrocities than Hamas “terrorists”.

That’s why they are being systematically liquidated and vilified.

Benjamin Netanyahu is about to wipe Gaza City off the map, and he and his deranged cabinet don’t want witnesses, despite 600 retired Israeli security officials who openly declared: “It is our professional judgment that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel.”

According to the UN, at least 242 Palestinian journalists have been killed in the war. To that grim figure, we can now add six more.

According to a report released in April by the Costs of War project of the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in both world wars, the Vietnam war, the wars in Yugoslavia, and the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For comparison, 1668 journalists were killed worldwide between 2003 and 2022, according to RSF.

In April, Sharif wrote what journalism meant to him: “I lived the pain in all its details [and] tasted grief and loss repeatedly. Despite that, I never hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or misrepresentation, hoping that God would witness those who remained silent, those who accepted our killing, and those who suffocated our very breaths.

“Not even the mangled bodies of our children and women moved their hearts or stopped the massacre that our people have been subjected to for over a year and a half.”

Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has called the genocidal push for “Greater Israel” the last of the West’s settler-colonial projects. But the struggle for Gaza is not only an urgent fight to stop the joint Israeli-American genocide, but also the last of the Global South’s decolonisation projects.

One by one, Australia, Britain, France and Canada say they will recognise the Palestinian state in September. They are not being brave or moral. Their governments have been complicit in the genocide. But their leaders have enough sense not to go down in history with their names etched in eternal infamy.

Sharif’s journalism has helped force them into that acknowledgement. His sacrifice will not be in vain.

Republished from South China Morning Post, 13 August 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.