Al Jazeera correspondents Anas al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh killed in Israeli attack
Our colleagues at Al Jazeera Arabic are reporting that Al-Sharif and Qreiqeh were killed in an Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip, along with cameramen Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal.
‘There’s zero evidence that al-Sharif took part in any hostilities’
Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif was a “very young boy, loved by everyone, by his entire community”, Muhammad Shehada, a writer and analyst from Gaza, tells Al Jazeera.
“He’s held enormous influence there, and that’s precisely why Israel murdered him.
“I’ve looked into the allegations that Israel produced, trying to smear him as a Hamas militant. The allegations were completely contradictory”, Shehada said.
He explained that Israel, in one document, lists him as “an elite combat militant”, and in another, as part of a “completely different unit”. A separate document lists him as having suffered “incapacitating wounds and injuries that would prevent him from being a militant”.
“Remember that Israel’s most prominent journalist, Barak Ravid… was an intelligence officer. There is a number of Israeli journalists who, throughout the genocide in Gaza, took this sort of revolving door kind of lifestyle, where they would go and serve in… combat, put on military gear, and then the next day, they would hold the camera,” he said.
“There’s zero evidence that al-Sharif took part in any hostilities, in any armed actions, aided or abetted any kind of these hostilities. None at all. His entire daily routine was standing in front of a camera from morning to evening”.
Anas Al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh had been reporting on Israel’s atrocities on the ground
This is perhaps the hardest thing I’m reporting about in the past 22 months.
I’m not far from al-Shifa Hospital, just one block away, and I could hear the massive explosion that took place in the past half an hour or so, near al-Shifa Hospital.
I could see it when it lit up the sky, and within moments, the news circulated that it was the journalist camp at the main gate of the al-Shifa Hospital.
At this particular time of the night, it calms down. All the journalists had gathered in one area, trying to either talk to each other, help each other to survive these conditions, when a drone strike hit the camp, killing Anas al-Sharif and his colleague, Mohammed Qreiqeh.
Both are correspondents of Al Jazeera Arabic on the ground.
They have been reporting on the atrocities of the Israeli military, the air strikes, the enforced starvation and dehydration of the past months.
It’s important to highlight that this attack is just a week after an Israeli military official directly accused Anas and directly ran a campaign of incitement on Al Jazeera and correspondents on the ground because of their work, because of their relentless reporting on the starvation and the famine and the malnutrition.
Because they’re bringing the truth of this crime to everyone.
And just a week after that statement was made by a prominent Israeli military official, it got translated on the ground by targeting this tent and killing two of the most prominent journalists on the ground.
