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Cowardly Israeli Murder of 5 Journalists, including Anas al-Sharif, Smearing them as Hamas

Note that firing a rocket at a tent known to be inhabited by unarmed civilian journalists is an act of cowardice and is the sort of thing for which German and Japanese officers were tried at Nuremberg.

 Informed Comment, Juan Cole, 08/11/2025, https://www.juancole.com/2025/08/cowardly-journalists-including.html

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Israeli state by now has a long and sanguinary history of murdering writers and journalists in cold blood. In 1972, Israeli commandos murdered novelist, painter and short story writer Ghassan Kanafani in Beirut with a car bomb — the weapon of choice for terrorists ever since — killing his niece Lamis as well. Kanafani’s crime was to be an effective voice of the 1948 Palestinian Nakba or catastrophic expulsion from their homeland by the militant Zionist settler-colonialists and then by the newly formed Israeli army. Anyone who hasn’t read his Men in the Sun has a hole in their knowledge of the issue.

On May 11, 2022, an Israeli sniper was ordered to murder American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. The powerful Israeli propaganda machine (which is not different than that of Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump, and the effectiveness of which is plummeting) initially asserted that Palestinians had killed her. Then it “might” have been an Israeli sniper. Then it was an Israeli sniper but it was an unfortunate accident. If that was the case, why did Israeli authorities disrupt even her funeral (she was a Greek Catholic)? Her crime was to report on the Israeli slow colonization of the Palestinian West Bank for 17 years for Al Jazeera. As a careful journalist, she became a trusted narrator of what was being done to the occupied Palestinians. She was eliminated, rubbed out, whacked, by the Israeli army, deliberately and calculatedly, which lied about the hit job.

Now on Sunday comes the news that the Israeli army assassinated five journalists, one of them lead Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif, 28, who had become known as the “voice of Gaza,” watched by millions throughout the world. The Israeli military fired a rocket at the tent he and four other journalists were sheltering in near the al-Shifa’ Hospital in Gaza City.

They join 178 journalists killed by the Israeli military in Gaza. Most of these killings appear to have been deliberate.

Russia appears to have killed 18 journalists in the field since February 2022. It has killed other journalists, but they were fighting in the Ukrainian military as soldiers and so weren’t killed qua journalists. The Ukraine War is pretty vicious and Putin’s minions are ruthless. But they’ve only rubbed out 18 practicing journalists, versus 178 for Israel. This is not to mention that Ukraine has a population of 37 million, while Gaza’s at least used to be 2.2 million. So killing 178 journalists in Gaza would be like killing nearly 3,000 journalists in Ukraine.

Note that firing a rocket at a tent known to be inhabited by unarmed civilian journalists is an act of cowardice and is the sort of thing for which German and Japanese officers were tried at Nuremberg.

The Israeli propaganda charges against al-Sharif, that he was an active-duty Hamas commando in charge of firing rockets at Israel, would be laughable if they weren’t so sinister in a Kim Jong Un sort of way. We saw al-Sharif all day every day huddling in Gaza, undernourished, staring into the camera and reporting. Is he Superman, to sneak off and fire a rocket between screen appearances and intensive news gathering?

Al-Sharif had prerecorded a statement for this eventuality, which was released on Sunday: By Anas Al-Sharif / X August 11, 2025, https://scheerpost.com/2025/08/11/anas-al-sharifs-final-message/

August 13, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, media