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| A marcher holds a photo of slain Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif, as pro-Palestinian protesters in New York City condemn the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, 16 August 2025. Photograph: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images |
The first time I met Al Jazeera’s Gaza team lead, Tamer Almisshal, was in July last year. His team had already buried two journalists, Hamza al-Dahdouh and Samer Abu Daqqa. The rest, he told me, were hungry. They were also dealing with trying to get hold of protective gear, threats from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the killing of family members. Ismail al-Ghoul hadn’t seen his wife and child in months and was missing them intensely. Hossam Shabat, Mohammed Qraiqea and Anas al-Sharif were asking for time to secure food in the morning before they could start reporting. Today, they are all dead.
I spoke with various members of the Gaza team while writing a profile of Gaza’s veteran reporter Wael al-Dahdouh, who lost his wife, three of his children and grandson. All spoke of their work as a duty that needed to be carried out despite the risks. Three members of that team have since been killed in a chain of assassinations. Each time I sent condolences, the response was always that the coverage would not cease. “We are continuing,” the Gaza editor told me last week, after he lost his entire Gaza City team in the targeted strike that claimed the lives of Sharif, Mohammed Nofal, Ibrahim Thaher and Qraiqea. “We will not betray their message, or their last wishes.”
As these killings dazed the world – and the response to them became mired in unproven and in some cases risibly implausible claims that some of these journalists were militants – little has been said about the calibre of journalism in Gaza. How fluent, articulate and poised its journalists are under impossible circumstances. How much they manage to capture horrific events and pain on a daily basis, in a journalistic Arabic that they have perfected to an art, while maintaining a professional, collected presence on camera. How much they manage to keep their cool. I struggled often to translate their words into English, so rich and expansive is their expression. Even Sharif’s final message, a text for the ages, loses some of its power in translation. In it, he addresses those who “choked” our breath, but the word he uses is closer to “besieged” – evoking not just physical asphyxiation but the silencing of a surveilled people’s voice.
What strikes
me when I speak with journalists in and from Gaza is how evangelical and
heartbreakingly idealistic they are; how much journalism to them was a
duty even if it meant certain death. All who have been killed had a
choice... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/18/israel-gaza-war-journalist-killed-safety-al-jazeera