Gaza: A thousand journalists may fall, but truth must not

Slain Al-Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif reporting from Gaza City. AFP

Journalists are a species designed to transform themselves into a medium that conveys to news-starved people what they see, hear, smell, taste, feel, and understand—enabling those who consume their news to make informed decisions and sound judgements on issues that are controversial, explosive, or even insipid.

Journalists write the first draft of history. In fact, they are often closer to the truth than historians, who are often criticised for a lack of objectivity and for their prejudices, and tendency to patronise victors or those in power. Had Hitler emerged as the victor of World War II, we would probably be studying a very different history.

This is why good journalists—those committed to ethics and the hallowed principles of their profession—are considered a threat by unscrupulous political powers. This does not mean that everyone in the field of journalism is an angel. Among journalists, there are those who distort the truth with such deception and sophistication that their audience comes to believe the aggressor is the victim, and resistance to aggression is terrorism. In certain Western media outlets, this brand of deceptive journalism has been normalised and entrenched, particularly in coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Embedded with Zionism, they prostitute journalism and produce bastardised news.

In stark contrast to these presstitutes, there are journalists who brave bombs, starvation, and even death to report the suffering of people in the besieged Gaza Strip to the outside world. Fitting squarely into this description are the slain journalists Anas al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, and Mohammed Noufal—all of whom worked for Al Jazeera, a channel that stands taller than the highfalutin Western media outlets such as BBC, CNN, Fox News, and the rest.

They were killed this week, for they reported the truth from the frontlines—for they dared to report the atrocities that proved the brutish nature of Israeli war criminals. In the targeted assassination of these journalists, whose courage even a Pulitzer could scarcely honour, there is a chilling warning to the few remaining reporters affiliated with international news agencies, especially Al Jazeera: You will be next. 

A thousand journalists may fall, but truth must not. 

With the killing of Anas and his colleagues, the number of Palestinian journalists killed by Israel since the start of the war in October 2023 stood at 242, according to UN figures. The number tells a disturbing truth—that it surpasses all journalists killed in major wars since the end of World War II. Israel has converted Gaza into a journalist-killing field in total disregard of the Additional Protocols of the Geneva Conventions, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and numerous UN General Assembly and UNESCO resolutions—international legal instruments mandating journalist protection.

As highlighted by the Sri Lanka Journalists for Global Justice in a statement condemning the killing of Anas and his colleagues, the systematic silencing of the media is part of Israel’s broader media blackout campaign to conceal its war crimes: killing and starving hundreds of Palestinians, including infants and children. The Zionist regime views journalists as enemies—obstacles to its genocidal campaign aimed at ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Yet, the brave remaining journalists in the Gaza Strip insist the coverage must continue, despite the death threats aimed at them. When Anas was asked to leave Gaza, he refused. To him, journalism’s calling was more sacred and fulfilling than the cowardly comfort of safety in an Arab country. In a social media message, he wrote, “I will not leave Gaza except to go to Jannah”—a reference to the Muslim paradise promised to those martyred in a just cause.

In the aftermath of Israel’s journalist massacre, Al Jazeera journalist Hind Khoudary—highly admired by her social media followers for her courageous journalism and steadfastness in reporting the truth as it is—said in an X post: “I will not speak to foreign media about the killing of Palestinian journalists. I will not sit on your global channels to be part of a segment you’ll forget by tomorrow. To you, we are just a headline — a tragedy to consume, not colleagues to defend. We are being hunted and killed in Gaza while you watch in silence. For two years, your fellow journalists here have been slaughtered. What did you do? Nothing. Or maybe it’s because we are Palestinian journalists—we don’t count as ‘real’ colleagues in your eyes.”

Her outrage is understandable, given the Western media’s calculated failure to play their part in preventing the genocide in Gaza. While Gaza’s journalists are being killed, the US government’s annual human rights report—hogwash dressed up as moral scrutiny—spares Israel even a rap on the knuckles, while hypocritically flagging threats to press freedom in Sri Lanka and several other nations. The killings of Gaza journalists during the State Department review period don’t even merit a footnote in the report.

Deprived of sleep, peace of mind, and proper food, Hind has been living and breathing death in Gaza since the war began. Her and her colleagues’ daily lives have been filled with pain, cries, and scenes of people—including children—dying from starvation, being bombed to death, being shot dead at US- and Israel-run food centres, and being amputated under bare-minimum surgical conditions.

Yet, in the bizarre twists Israel is apt at springing, journalism becomes a crime, and killing the messenger is legitimised as an act of war. Justifying the killing of journalists, Israel claimed that Anas al-Sharif was a Hamas cell leader and, to substantiate its claim, released photographs showing the slain journalist alongside Hamas leaders. 

In this everyone-is-a-cameraperson age, according to phototutorial.com, approximately 5.3 billion pictures are taken daily across the world, with smartphones accounting for 94 percent of them. If Israel’s logic is accepted, then everyone becomes everyone else—simply by appearing in a photograph together.

At the forefront of this twisted narrative that criminalises pure journalism as evil was Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador in Israel, a Zionist serf. Not long ago, he said that Palestinians should be expelled from both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and should go set up a “free Palestine” in a territory carved out from Arab countries.

Gaza’s tragedy is such a paradox that even calling for protection for journalists may sound inappropriate, given the scale of the genocide unfolding there, with starvation weaponised to kill civilians, including babies, whose deaths, Zionist psychopaths justify on the basis that if left alive, these children will become tomorrow’s terrorists.

With Israel all set to reoccupy Gaza under a plan that includes no provisions to protect Palestinians’ human rights and shows no regard for international law, the crying need for journalists committed to truth cannot be overstated.

This is especially true when the United States’ so-called peacemaking president, Donald Trump, has given a carte blanche to Israel to commit whatever crimes it deems necessary to achieve the Zionist goal of Greater Israel (Eretz Israel), incorporating not only the Palestinian territories but also parts of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, alias Butcher of Gaza, confirmed in an interview this week that Eretz Israel is the final goal.