Anas al-Sharif was murdered for being Gaza's voice

They killed him where the wounded cling to life.

Outside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the Israeli army assassinated Al Jazeera correspondents Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh, along with camera operators Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa, in a direct bombardment of their media tent. 

This was no accident of war. It was a precision attack - the deliberate erasure of journalists who would not stop telling the truth.

Sharif was a young Palestinian from Jabalia, in northern Gaza. He had been covering the war for 22 months. His only “crime” was refusing to turn away, as he insisted on exposing the realities of genocide: the boundless killing, the calculated destruction of every thread of life. He worked without pause.

Born in 1996, Sharif was three years old when the Second Intifada began; he was 10 when Israel first blockaded Gaza, 12 when the 2008 Gaza war erupted, and 18 during the 2014 assault. 

He was just 28 when Israel finally killed him on Sunday. His life was mapped by wars, each one deadlier than the last.

For 22 months, Sharif’s reporting entered millions of homes across the Arab world. More than a journalist, he became a trusted witness. His audience knew his grief as much as they knew his voice: the killing of his father by Israeli fire, and his separation from his mother, his daughter Sham, his baby son Salah - born during the genocide - and his wife Bayan. 

We followed him to the fiercest fronts in northern Gaza, where he worked through bombardment and starvation, never bending, never silenced.

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