Urgent Ideas for Defending Press Freedom in Gaza

Last Sunday night, the Israeli military targeted Al Jazeera’s most prominent journalist still alive in Gaza, Anas al-Sharif, killing him, three colleagues, and two freelancers inside a tent used by media workers near al-Shifa Hospital. I write “still alive” because, according to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists, Israel has killed nineteen Al Jazeera staff journalists and freelancers in Gaza since the war broke out. The total number of Palestinian journalists that CPJ has recorded killed by Israel in Gaza during this period—a hundred and eighty-four—exceeds all previous records the organization has tracked, and local press freedom groups that are entrenched on the ground, such as the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, put the figure even higher, at well over two hundred. At least twenty-six of these killings CPJ has identified as deliberately targeted—often, as with al-Sharif, on the basis of “unsubstantiated terrorist labels.”

At this point, to the millions who have spent the past twenty-two months closely watching the journalism of al-Sharif and the media workers killed with him—correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh, camera operators Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal, and freelancers Moamen Aliwa and Mohammad al-Khaldi—their killing seemed an obvious effort to snuff out the widest-reaching news broadcast from the ground ahead of the Israeli government’s plans to take over Gaza City.