Connect the Dots 101

An Israeli airstrike kills a prominent Al Jazeera journalist and colleagues in Gaza

Reporters Without Borders says Israel’s lethal attacks on the media in Gaza have created the highest death toll for journalists ever recorded in a single year of war anywhere. NPR’s Aya Batrawy reports on the latest attack that killed Gaza’s most prominent television journalist Sunday night. 

 Journalists cry out in disbelief. “Anas al-Sharif has just been martyred,” they say. The video shows the moments after a press tent was struck. Inside is 28-year-old al-Sharif’s lifeless, bloodied body, killed while wearing a blue press vest journalists don in war zones. Al-Sharif always wore it. He was a target, one of six Al Jazeera journalists named in a list 10 months ago by Israel, which accused them of having ties with militant groups. He saw his friends on that list assassinated or severely wounded. But al-Sharif, a father of two young children, one of whom was born in the war, never wavered and never left the north.

[His] reporting gained him huge admiration in Gaza and a combined social media following of 2 million people globally. In all, six journalists were killed in Sunday night’s attack, five of them with Al Jazeera, the network says. It happened just as Israel’s government plans to take over all of Gaza City, raising questions as to why the military killed al-Sharif now. Al Jazeera says the attack is an attempt to, quote, “silence the voices exposing the” military’s “impending seizure and occupation of Gaza.”

Israel’s military confirmed the airstrike, saying al-Sharif was a Hamas cell commander operating under the false cover of a journalist. The military published digitally altered graphics of documents it says show al-Sharif was a, quote, “terrorist” within the ranks of Hamas. The Committee to Protect Journalists says the allegations are unsubstantiated. 

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/12/g-s1-82143/gaza-anas-al-sharif-al-jazeera-israel