Since October 2023, I have been closely following the most outstanding cohort of journalists in the world: the mighty but dwindling community of journalists in Gaza.
For about a year, I attended protests every Saturday in Chicago, Washington, and later Athens (Greece, not Georgia). Throughout each week, I’d post photos of every journalist who’d been killed. I would then print out their photos and make a sign to carry in that Saturday’s march.
In this way, I got to know the names and faces of dozens of martyred journalists. In the wake of their killings, I would try to follow even more closely the work of their surviving colleagues.
But now, nearly two years and more than 250 assassinations later, I can count the names of the living journalists in Gaza I follow on one hand.
The number has gotten so low that there are hardly any journalists left in Gaza to report on how there are hardly any journalists left in Gaza.
There is an obliterating nature to the kind of grief and anger I felt when I learned that Anas had been killed.
In the last two weeks, two high profile journalists have been martyred: one was Awdah Hathaleen, a consultant on the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, who was lynched by settlers on live video in the West Bank. The other was Al Jazeera reporter Anas Al-Sharif. Though only 28 years old, Al-Sharif was kind of the captain of journalists in the north, especially after Hossam Sabbat was killed in March.
There have been other Palestinian journalists killed in the last two weeks whose lives were no less important and whose deaths no less tragic, but the lynching and targeted assassination of these two men signal something particularly sinister: Israel’s concerted effort to eliminate every journalist in Palestine who has borne witness to this genocide. The message the entity is sending is brutally obvious.
There is an obliterating nature to the kind of grief and anger I felt when I learned that Anas had been killed. It is hard to write a story that doesn’t feel hollow when the most important storytellers have been murdered. How do I even attempt to make sense of my scattered thoughts now that almost every journalist in Gaza is gone? What is there to say when our souls have been shattered day after day, week after week, year after year? When it seems as if the only end to this nightmare will be the death of everyone who’s been reporting it (followed by the death of everyone they reported on)? How do we even begin to tell this story?
Do we begin by thinking, selfishly, about the parasocial dynamics of this livestreamed genocide? How strange it is that social media has allowed us to carry the narrators of genocide in our pockets all day long, such that we have grown to feel we have lost a friend when they are killed? When 23-year-old Hossam Shabbat was killed, I felt a stab in the heart because I had corresponded with him directly in DMs. I felt an affinity with him because he was supposed to be finishing journalism school in the fall of 2023, and because he was the same age as many of my students. He was so sweet in our exchanges that it broke my heart that he didn’t survive until a real ceasefire; I had hoped to have him speak with my students someday. And even though I never communicated with Anas, I felt a sense of physical grief in my body when I learned he had died, truly akin to how my body has felt in the past when a member of my family has died.
Do we begin by considering how enraging it is that Anas and his three Al Jazeera colleagues—correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh, and camera operators Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal—were killed in a journalism tent outside of Al Shifa hospital? There have been so many attacks on Gaza’s hospitals that there’s a Wikipedia entry entitled, “Attacks on health facilities during the Gaza war.” Still, the attack on Al-Shifa is memorable for a few reasons. First of all, an ambulance convoy was bombed outside of Al-Shifa in early November 2023. At the time, it was so shocking (even after the bombing of Al-Ahil hospital a couple weeks before) that in my group chat with my Palestinian cousins, we texted that we simply couldn’t believe this would be allowed to go on. This has to stop…right? Then, Al-Sihfa became the site of a heartbreaking press conference just a few days later, when a desperate group children humbly said to the people of the world, “we invite you to protect us.” But the world failed to do so, the children were scattered to the winds, and Al Shifa was evacuated and assaulted repeatedly—right up until this week, when Anas and his colleagues were murdered there as they tried to report on how doctors and patients struggled to hold onto life in the face of death.
Do we begin by taking an honest look at Anas Al-Sharif himself? He was small and slight to begin with, appearing much shorter when he stood next to his colleagues. In his press helmet and vest, he sometimes looked like a kid playing reporter in an adult war correspondent’s outfit. Stationed in the north, which he never abandoned, he grew gaunt without food and became even thinner over time; he even once posted a cartoon someone had made of him depicting how skinny he’d gotten. And yet, Anas was enormous in spirit. Often broadcasting as a solo figure, a lone voice chronicling the destruction wrought by US-Israel assault on his homeland, he was a giant of journalism’s highest ideals. “If I die,” he said in his final will and testament, “I die steadfast upon my principles,” which he did while towering over every journalist in the West.
Do we begin by recalling how the Israeli military put a target on Al-Sharif’s back last year when it claimed Anas and five other journalists were “Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists”? Anas responded, “Silence or death: This is what the IOF wants from me and from the journalists of Gaza.” They did not cow him into silence; they had to kill him to achieve that. As Alice Wong and I wrote in our October 2024 piece, “A Letter Supporting Six Honorable Journalists in Northern Gaza,” Israel’s claims, combined with the near-total silence of journalists and politicians in the United States and Europe, would likely get all of these journalists killed. Now at least two of those six honorable journalists, Anas and Hossam, are dead, and at least one other is seriously wounded.
Do we begin with the obscene framing of these assassinations in the mainstream media? Consider the New York Times story headlined, “What to know about Al Jazeera, the broadcaster targeted by Israel” and subtitled, “Al Jazeera, five of whose reporters the broadcaster said were killed by an Israeli strike, has angered governments across the region that claim it gives voice to terrorists. The outlet denies that.” To begin with, saying that an outlet “gives voice to terrorists” could certainly apply to the Times itself (see “Osama Bin Laden in His Own Words” or “Audio Special: Henry Kissinger”). Regardless, this framing misunderstands what journalists are supposed to do (interview lots of people!) and opens the Overton Window to the possibility that “angered governments” are justified in assassinating journalists who interview people states don’t like. Furthermore, this method of raising something incredulously in the first half of a headline or sub headline (“governments across the region that claim it gives voice to terrorists”) followed by an open ended Who can know?-type phrase (“The outlet denies that”) fails another one of journalism’s central functions: find out what happened, then report it! (The Times did something similar with its bullshit headline “‘Arab Force’ Running Gaza? Netanyahu’s Goal Leaves Many Questions,” which helped paper over Netanyahu’s illegal (not to mention genocidal) plan for the Israeli military to occupy Gaza City—which is what it was doing when it killed Aanas and his colleagues.
If journalism still mattered, what Anas and his colleagues died to show us would have changed things long ago.
Do we begin by getting angry at so-called journalism educators? For obvious reasons, I am angry and deeply disappointed by the silence of Dean Charles Whitaker and most of my colleagues at the Medill School of Journalism (and, sadly, at the “leadership” and faculty of most American journalism schools), who have said nothing about the obliteration of Gaza’s entire journalistic firmament. What makes Medill’s silence even more glaring is the fact that, in 2022, the school presented its annual James Foley Medill Medal for Courage Award to Associated Press reporters Mstyslav Chernov, Evgeniy Maloletka, and Vasilisa Stepanenko for chronicling “the attacks of Russia on innocent Ukrainian civilians during the early stages of the Russian-Ukraine war.” Curiously, though I was suspended from teaching at Medill the first time, in part, for saying that I do not teach students “objectivity,” one of the Medill Courage Award judges said that these Ukrainian reporters’ “bravery under fire and their work to help the people of Mariupol, guiding them to shelters and protecting them, define courage in journalism” and they applauded them for having “risked their lives to report harrowing details of children as young as 18-months-old buried in trenches” and “sent the outside world graphic photos, video and narrative, exposing the horror of the Russian siege.” Yet, Medill has not awarded Palestinian journalists in any way nor, as an institution, expressed public solidarity, appreciation, or even sympathy as 250 of them have been hunted down.
Do we begin by considering, then, how in their silence, so-called journalists and so-called journalism educators have made journalism appear to be powerless and useless? As Zeteo’s Prem Thekkar observed, “Between a No Other Land crew mate filming himself being killed by a settler, to a journalist being killed by airstrikes he was covering minutes earlier, I’m not sure how much more televised Israel’s genocide can be.” If this level of horror can be written about, recorded, Tweeted, livestreamed, and broadcast by journalists in Gaza, only to be ignored by politicians and journalists in the West, then what is the point of journalism? And let us not even entertain the cry by Christiane Amanpour and others that things would change if “international journalists” were allowed into Gaza. If Western journalists are allowed into Gaza, it will be important primarily as an act of sharing the same burden of risk with our Palestinian colleagues and to build interpersonal bridges with them. (My investigative reporting partner Afeef Nessouli spent nine-weeks in Gaza, worked as a medical volunteer, and shared the same risks as everyone else.) But the sudden presence of Western journalists in the strip will not better inform the world. Some 250 souls already departed this earth informing us. If journalism still mattered, what Anas and his colleagues died to show us would have changed things long ago. It would have stopped the world. But thanks to journalists, academics, and politicians in the West denigrating their vital work, the entire field of journalism has been made politically irrelevant.
Do we begin by appreciating the dignity Palestinian journalists have brought the profession? In the West, journalism is largely about “scoops” and competition. But in Gaza, journalists worked together to bring the news of their slaughter to the world. When the lungs of one were collapsed by the shockwaves of bombs, their colleagues carried them to their rest, burying them in a blue PRESS vest. That is, until the number of dead journalists came to outnumber the living, until there was hardly any left to serve as pallbearers.
Perhaps we shouldn’t know any peace for as long as there is no peace in Gaza.
Or do we begin by daring to think about how many bright, loving young people have given their lives to stop this nightmare, only for it to continue unabated? While finishing edits on my new book, I had to repeatedly watch the unblurred video of Aaron Bushnell self-immolating in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C. in early 2024. While I am usually quite clinical when I need to report on scenes of intense violence or grief, I found myself weeping when I watched Aaron burning alive. It was not just the immensity of suffering and pain in his screams of horror that made me cry; I had watched the same video when he died in 2024.
Rather, it was the rush of sorrow that came upon me when I thought about how this beautiful young man had given everything, how he had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hopes that others might live, and how, 18 months later, the genocide he died trying to stop is still roaring on.
How do we consider any of this without feeling like our minds and our spirits are disintegrating?
Perhaps we can’t. And perhaps that’s as it should be. Perhaps we shouldn’t know any peace for as long as there is no peace in Gaza. Perhaps we whose taxes are funding this genocide, we who have failed to stop the slaughter, deserve to be as broken in spirit as the bodies that are broken by our bombs.
When I saw the photo of Anas after he was killed—his sweet, tender body scorched, his face frozen in horror, his precious life snuffed out after surviving 22 months of a hell he’d never escape until he left this earth—I could barely breathe.
I wanted to give up.
And yet, I cannot. We cannot.
Not when Anas is telling us from the other side of the veil what we must do.
When Anas says that he “never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification,” we, too, must keep telling the truth, even if we are punished for doing so. When he urges us “not to let chains silence you, nor borders restrain you” and to “Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland,” we must do so with a full heart and a clear mind. He carried on until the end, and so must we.
When Anas says that he “entrust[s] you with Palestine—the jewel in the crown of the Muslim world, the heartbeat of every free person in this world,” we must accept this gift as responsibly as he gave it.
When Anas entrusts us with the care of his mother, his wife and his babies, it is inexcusable to give in to defeat. We must act more urgently.
“Do not forget Gaza,” Anas signs off, “And do not forget me in your sincere prayers for forgiveness and acceptance.”
We will never forget you, Anas, nor Mohammed, nor Mohammed, nor Ibrahim, nor Awdah.
And the way we will beg for forgiveness from the heavens is by doing everything we can to prevent what happened to you here on this cruel earth from happening to your family, or to anyone else in Palestine.