Israeli forces fired at an Al Jazeera news crew on Friday as it covered an illegal settler attack in the town of Talfit, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, the broadcaster said.
The Qatar-based channel reported that soldiers shot toward its team, causing partial damage to camera equipment.
Al Jazeera correspondent Tharwat Shaqra said in a live broadcast that troops used live ammunition against the crew before firing a tear gas canister that directly struck and damaged filming gear.
She said the journalists were positioned in a clearly visible, open area and were targeted without being asked to leave the location.
The Israeli army did not immediately comment on the incident.
The shooting occurred as the crew was reporting on a settler attack in Talfit that left three Palestinians injured, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent. One person was shot and taken to hospital, while two others were beaten and treated at the scene.
Israel closed Al Jazeera’s operations inside Israel on May 5, 2024, and shut its offices in the West Bank on Sept. 22, 2024, with the closure order repeatedly extended.
On Dec. 23, 2025, Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi said the channel would be barred from operating “forever.”
Israel has intensified operations in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, since launching its military campaign in Gaza on Oct. 8, 2023. Palestinians view the escalation, including killings, arrests, displacement and settlement expansion, as a step toward formal annexation of the territory.
At least 1,112 Palestinians have been killed and about 11,500 injured in the West Bank during that period, and more than 21,000 people have been arrested.
In a landmark opinion in July 2024, the International Court of Justice declared Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory illegal and called for the evacuation of all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Anadolu
The Israeli genocide starting on 27 October, 2023 through mass bombs and missiles dropped on the Gaza Strip is being discribed as hell-on-earth. After 700 days of slaughter in which the enclave was reduced to ruin, debris and mass killings, Gazans speak of the “hell” they are going through between multiple and countless displacements, starvation and waiting in limbo for what is going to happen next. Their lives have been turned upside down and live in limbo of fog.
All the above interviews were conducted by Al Jazeera satellite channel on the 700 days of horrors the Israeli army has subjected the Palestinian civilians of Gaza to.
“700 days and the killings are still going on with the war taking everything from us,” said one man. “The blood of martyrs is still hemorrhaging,” he continued.
“I now envy the people who have died in this slaughter,” said another. “In this past 700 days, journalists were killed, civil defense men gone, hospitals bombed, children murdered and many other things disappeared…”
After 700 days there is nothing left, there is no children left, no food, no drink, starvation everywhere, life has become extremely difficult. I have started to say to myself I wish I was long dead and have left this sorry place,” said another woman.
What about the handicapped
‘“I have three teenager sons who are handicapped and the process of displacement with them is very difficult…we were forced to move by the Israeli army more than 15 times – I walked them, I sometimes carried them would you believe, there is no transport and walked under bombs and missiles, sometimes they’d fall very near us, the danger of being killed is real,” the father of the three said.
“There is no food, no drink, there is no place to live, the sewerage is bad, we can’t do anything.”
He added on this 700 day of living like this, the Israeli army has just called on us to keep moving. “They want to displace us yet again from the north to the south, what is next we don’t know.
We don’t have food, we don’t have water, we don’t have tents, we don’t have anything. On the 700 day, the world is just sitting and looking at us while we move from one place to another.
Another 30-year-old who lost her husband and five children and just stares into the void: “Now they are gone I feel life is empty and meaningless. I force myself to work just to forget but its like living in a distant memory and suddenly wake up to this nightmare.
Another man with five small children moving around him said: “I have a handicapped son – a grown up, as you can see and I have to carry him across my shoulder blades whenever we are ordered to keep moving.
We are at the end of our tethers after 700 days of devastation, we see death in front of our eyes, there is no let up, the kids keep screaming at all hours of the day and night. We don’t know what is going to happen to us and now we are called upon to keep moving.”
The same is true of another lady. Her plight is the same as many others. “We are being displaced from one place to another. After 700 days we are not able to settle down to establish a tent we can live in, being displaced is like losing one’s soul and I don’t know when this will end or how.
We are living in devastation, death, slow death. Today I envy the people who have died and become martyrs.”
Another man in crutches said: “Our savings have now ended, we are on aid to say alive, my son used to go to Zakim to get some stuff but they shot at him and now sit by me unable to move.
Blood on the streets
“The past 700 days were the deadliest, killings, bombing, starvation, you see blood seething on the streets, laying bodies of martyrs, people with no legs or arms”.
It has been an extremely difficult 700 days for a woman with the responsibility of looking after three children. “How do I cope, how do I make ends meet. My husband went before my eyes, in front of his kids, I saw, my kids saw an incredible sight of their father spluttering on the wall and now that image never leaves me nor them.
In this 700 days you lost a brother, a relative, a friend as you were forced to move from one place to another in between charities, water queues, cutting wood and all the rest of it. I just can’t describe it,” said one young man.
Sullen future
“For me, my future has perished, gone up in flames, I could have been working by now, having just finished university, but I live in a 4 by 6 tent with nothing to look forward, searching for morsels of food and hewing water, carrying buckets of water not just today but everyday, said a young lady.
Nothing is for certain. The people of Gaza, as of yet, have nothing to look forward to but more slaughter. There is a nagging fleeing, frequently made by Israeli ministers, that the aim is to push these people dubbed at around two million to other countries.
But the Gazans, still after two years of slaughter and going to the third, say they are not leaving Gaza except as dead bodies.
Israeli warplanes killed four journalists, Monday morning as they targeted the Nasser Medical Hospital in Khan Yunis in the south of the Gaza Strip. The Israeli bombing killed Al Jazeera cameraman Mohammed Salama, photo-journalist Hossam al-Masry, journalist Mariam Abu Daqqa, and journalist Moaz Abu Taha.
The targeting also killed 11 other Palestinians and wounded dozens of others according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
The bombing directly targeted the fourth floor of the Nasser Hospital, with a second attack on the Yassin building inside the Nasser complex through an Israeli a suicide drone.
The Gaza Civil Defense added one of its personnel was killed and seven others wounded while attempting to rescue the injured and retrieve the bodies of the victims in the bombing of the hospital.
The deadly attack comes amid ongoing Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip since 7 October, amid UN warnings of the complete collapse of the health system.
According to Government Media Office statistics Israel killed 244 Palestinian journalists in Gaza, the latest of whom were the four journalists killed, Monday, in the bombing of Nasser Medical Complex.
The government media office called on “the international community, international organizations, and organizations involved in journalism and media in all countries of the world to condemn the crimes of the occupation, deter it, prosecute it in international courts for its ongoing crimes, and bring the occupation’s criminals to justice.”
It also called for serious and effective pressure to stop the crime of genocide, protect journalists and media professionals in the Gaza Strip, and halt their killing and assassination, according to a statement from the Government Media Office.
With American support, Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza since October 7, 2023, including killing, starvation, destruction, and forced displacement, ignoring all international appeals and orders from the International Court of Justice to halt it.
The Israeli genocide left more than 62,000 Palestinians dead, approximately 158,000 wounded—mostly children and women—more than 9,000 missing, and hundreds of thousands displaced.
Palestinian journalists seek to document the truth about the Zionists’ brutal siege, while their detractors are working to erase all evidence of the crime scene.
Shortly after the news broke about the Israeli assassination of Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif and his five colleagues in Gaza City, a video appeared on my Facebook feed of chef Yotam Ottolenghi making baked haloumi cheese with fennel syrup.
In real time, the two events have nothing to do with each other. However, delving deeper into the realm of the imagination, both represent long-held Israeli efforts to erase the Palestinian presence on the land.
In a statement on the social media platform X, journalist Ramzy Baroud explained Israel’s motives for the murder of at least 200 journalists in Gaza since October 7, 2023: “silence the truth by murdering those who report it.”
Afterward, they justify these deaths by claiming that the journalists were members of the resistance movement, a claim that is problematic for several reasons.
In a timely excerpt from Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal (2025), Mohammed El-Kurd contends that allies often unwittingly refute the claim that victims, such as these journalists, were affiliated with Hamas. In this way, the characterization of the civilian as a “neutral figure” has depoliticized the Palestinian cause, rendering it a “humanitarian crisis” where “revolutionaries are not part and parcel of your nation.”
In the U.S., too, police shootings of Black, Brown and poor people are often justified by slandering the victim’s reputation post-mortem. This should come as no surprise, since the institution of policing harks back to its origin as slave catchers, along with its more present-day exchange of training with the Zionist state.
“It is not enough for a Palestinian to be a journalist to be deemed human,” concludes El-Kurd, “they must be ‘unaffiliated.’”
For “Israelis,” this effort must prove difficult as they are taught to see Hamas everywhere, much like Americans were told to look for communists during the Second Red Scare in the 1950s. The latter were in our bathrooms, under our beds, and if we were not watchful, we might mistakenly marry one.
In “The Hamas are Coming: A View of the Violence from Inside Israel” (2021), Miko Peled writes of this phenomenon that has informed Israeli hasbara (propaganda) for years.
“There are never Palestinians, never people, only ‘The Hamas’ — and ‘The Hamas’ is, by the way, male and singular (in Hebrew),” Peled writes. “’The Hamas thinks;’ ‘The Hamas believes;’ ‘The Hamas should know;’ ‘When the Hamas understands, he will stop;’ and finally, ‘When The Hamas is hit hard he will never dare to attack Israel again.’”
Not much has changed in Israeli hasbara since Peled wrote that piece nearly four years ago. Indeed, the New York Times, taking its cue, as usual, from Israeli sources, repeated that “Mr. al-Sharif,” whom the Israeli military accused of being a Hamas fighter posing as a reporter, but was really “the head of a terrorist cell,” thus the IDF “had taken steps to mitigate civilian harm,” though which civilians, Palestinians or “Israelis,” it does not say.
Barbs were then thrown back and forth. Al-Jazeera called the killing “a desperate attempt to silence the voices exposing the impending seizure and occupation of Gaza” while the “Israeli Government” accused “Al Jazeera reporters of serving the interests of Hamas by presenting an exaggerated and distorted picture of conditions in Gaza.”
“The instinct of many defenders of Palestinians is to dispel the connection between the slain Palestinian media workers and their supposed political leanings, as if anywhere in the world these exist in isolation,” El-Kurd explains.
Just as El-Kurd implicates himself in this process, so do I. There have been times when I’ve distanced martyrs from supporting the armed resistance as if this gives us a more legitimate cause to mourn.
When we sanitize the dead in this way, however, “we are inadvertently reifying the colonial rationale that killed them and rendered them killable in the first place,” El-Kurd concludes, so perhaps it is better to just reply “So what?” Indeed, if Zionist soldiers and PR workers can find a place for themselves in global media, why do supporters of Palestine find the need to detach their heroes from armed resistance that occupies a legitimate role in the struggle?
There are many documented reasons as to why Israel targets journalists in the Gaza Strip. Significantly, Palestinian journalists seek to document the truth about the Zionists’ brutal siege, while their detractors are working to erase all evidence of the crime scene.
Moreover, for Western journalists, even those sympathetic to the cause, the only picture they can paint is that of victims who are barely surviving in the rubble.
In an interview with Beacon Press, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz describes a similar settler colonial narrative that pertains to Indigenous people in the Americas. Asked to explain the most enduring myth pertaining to Native Americans, Dunbar-Ortiz mentions the idea of “eliminationism,” a notion that does away with Native people.
Indeed, at the turn of the 20th century, the myth of the Vanishing Indian was at its zenith, thus allowing the mainstream population to view Native people as noble relics who exist only in the glory days of their past. These same people who at one time they had license to kill Native people are seen now as no longer a threat, subdued as they were in the last Indian massacre at Wounded Knee.
In reality, Native people have survived over 500 years of continual genocide, survival being an “active word,” Dunbar-Ortiz makes clear, involving “an enormous amount of resistance and cultural continuity.”
On the other hand, “victimry” is a more common version, she concludes, because people can feel sorry about the state of Indian Country but without the requirement that they must do anything about it. “So they’re not really then dealing with the reality that Native people are here,” and like the Palestinians, “they’ve resisted, they’ve survived, they haven’t changed their mind about who they want to be and how they want the future to be.”
In “Sumoud: The Unyielding Heart of the Palestinian Cause in Palestine,” Ramzy Baroud describes a similar trajectory for Palestinians. “The profound and unrelenting struggles endured by Palestinians should, by any rational expectation, have irrevocably concluded the Palestinian cause. Yet, the struggle for freedom in Palestine is at its zenith.”
Like the experience of Native Americans, Zionist attempts to erase the presence of Palestinians goes back many decades. Nevertheless, the Palestinian resistance has endured, Baroud continues, due to the “concept of sumoud,” resilience that is akin to Dunbar-Ortiz’s explanation of “survival,” an active process that involves resistance and cultural endurance.
“Palestinian journalists in Gaza are themselves the story and the storytellers,” writes Ramzy Baroud. “Their success or failure to convey the story with all its factual and emotional details could make the difference between the continuation or the end of the Israeli genocide.”
From Refaat Alareer, the poet/teacher/ journalist who asked before his death that his life become a story to ensure that life goes on, to Anas Al-Sharif’s final testament written shortly before his death, Palestinian journalists have been responsible for conveying the truths of Gaza to the world, but they also leave a legacy that inspires future generations to carry on their work.
“Do not let chains silence you or borders restrain you. Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland,” Al-Sharif wrote, shortly before his death.
With that last statement, Al-Sharif foretells his own assassination. His message is not one of victimhood, though, but rather a plea that others carry on his work.
On August 11, Dareen Tatour, the Palestinian poet who knew from experience the danger of rebellious words, posted a new poem written to honor the Al-Jazeera team murdered the day before.
Imprisoned for her verse “Resist, My People, Resist Them,” the poet is not so optimistic now that words can stop a bullet. Under the banner Martyrs of the Word and Image—They Left But the Word Remained, Tatour charged that their deaths were the consequence of a world gone silent to their pain.
“They are gone / but the truth remains,” she says, dependent on her to carry it, or “leave it to be bombed again” in the wake of her silence.
Unlike the person that she was ten years ago, Tatour knows now that “the road is longer and harsher,” yet still she is undeterred, for she continues “to write for them [the slain journalists], to be the echo of their voices,” because in this way, the Palestinian narrative will be triumphant.
– Benay Blend earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
The UN organization which champions culture and education, UNESCO, has strongly condemned the targeted killing of six journalists in Palestine by an Israeli drone on 10 August.
“I condemn the killing of journalists Anas Al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, Moamen Aliwa, and Mohammed Al-Khaldi and call for a thorough and transparent investigation,” UNESCO’s Director-General, Audrey Azoulay, said in a statement on Tuesday.
Five of the six worked for the influential Qatari-based media organization, Al Jazeera: Anas Al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh were on air correspondents, while Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa worked as camera operators. Mohammed Al-Khaldi was a freelance photojournalist.
They were reportedly killed by an Israeli attack on a tent used by media personnel at the entrance of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
Blatant, premeditated attack
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) alleged that 28-year-old correspondent Anas al-Sharif was a serving Hamas operative. Al Jazeera strongly denies this, describing the attack as an “assassination” and “yet another blatant and premeditated attack on press freedom.”
The UN Human Rights Council-appointed independent expert on freedom of expression issued a statement on 31 July denouncing an Israeli military spokesperson’s “repeated threats” and “unfounded accusations” against Mr. Anas Al-Sharif, flagging it as “a blatant attempt to endanger his life and silence his reporting” in Gaza.
Condemning the attack in the strongest possible terms on Tuesday, two special rapporteurs described the killings as “an attempt to silence reporting on the ongoing genocide and starvation campaign” in Gaza.
“It is outrageous that the Israeli army dares to first launch a campaign to smear Anas Al-Sharif as Hamas in order to discredit his reporting and then kill him and his colleagues for speaking the truth to the world,” the experts said, demanding an immediate investigation into the killings and full access to international media, which Israel currently bars from entering Gaza.
Special Rapporteurs and other independent experts are appointed by and report regularly to the Human Rights Council. They work in their individual capacity, are not UN staff and receive no payment for their work.
Violation of international law
UNESCO chief Ms. Azoulay stressed that targeting journalists reporting on conflicts is unacceptable and violates international law.
She also reiterated her call to respect UN Security Council Resolution 2222, which was unanimously adopted in 2015 to protect journalists, media professionals and associated personnel in conflict situations.
Since October 2023, UNESCO has reported at least 62 journalists and media workers killed in the line of duty in Palestine, excluding deaths in circumstances unrelated to their work, while OHCHR reports that at least 242 Palestinian journalists have been killed in the same time frame.
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