"Assassination," wrote George Bernard Shaw, "is the extreme form of censorship." This truth was brought home to the world this week, said Binoy Kampmark on Middle East Monitor, when a prominent Palestinian journalist, Anas al-Sharif, was killed along with three of his Al Jazeera colleagues by an air strike on a press tent in Gaza City.
An Israel Defence Forces (IDF) spokesman confirmed that Sharif had been deliberately targeted, claiming that intelligence obtained before the strike proved he was "an active Hamas military wing operative". Sceptics dismissed that claim, asking how Sharif could have led a rocket-launching squad while reporting in front of a camera all day.
A different IDF spokesman had levelled the same accusation at Sharif last month, prompting calls from the Committee to Protect Journalists for the "international community" to safeguard the life of the 28-year-old father of two.
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Journalists targeted
This is just the latest horror to hit journalists in Gaza, said Fiona O'Brien in The London Standard. Israel has banned all foreign reporters from entering the enclave, leaving only local ones like Sharif to tell the world what's going on there.
Almost 200 have been killed since the war began in 2023, "at least 46 of whom were directly targeted". Others have died of hunger. "Several correspondents have collapsed live on air."
In a statement last month, the outgoing board of the AFP press agency said it was the first time since the agency's founding in 1944 that it had seen colleagues dying "not from bombs or bullets, but from starvation".
A shameful assault
Sharif was "never likely to be an impartial witness" to the Gaza War, said the Daily Mail. He was born and raised in northern Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp. His father was killed by an Israeli bomb. And like all local journalists, he could "work only with the tacit approval of the Hamas-run authorities".
But even if he was a Hamas sympathiser, that in itself wouldn't justify killing him, still less the other members of his film crew, about whom no such claims have been made. If Israel has direct evidence that Sharif was engaged in terrorism, they should produce it. In the absence of such material, this killing looks like a shameful assault on press freedom.
