Anas al-Sharif was a Palestinian journalist from Gaza. He was 28, had two children and worked for Al Jazeera. On Sunday, Israel killed him.
These facts are not in dispute. They are real. As real as the rays of sunlight shining through your windows, as real as his children, as real as the anguish of his family, as real as the shattering of his dreams. As real as the rage that burns in the heart with every Gazan calamity.
As real as the cascade of souls fleeing the emaciated bodies of Gaza’s children, and those who burned in Israel’s ongoing conflagration.
As a journalist myself, inculcated in the vaunted Western tradition of the craft, allow me the space for a few more facts.
Israel purposely targeted Anas while he was staying in a tent with other Al Jazeera staffers outside a hospital, and murdered him and his friends. Murder was the word used by the Committee to Protect Journalists to describe the attack. They killed correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh, photojournalists Ibrahim Zaher and Moamen Aliwa, and Mohammed Noufal, another staff member. The Israeli military admitted to this, calling Anas, one of the most recognizable faces reporting on and witnessing the genocide in Gaza, a Hamas terrorist. The Israeli military’s claim, however, is not a fact. It’s what we used to call a lie, a concept that has largely lost all meaning because of how inundated by lies we have become.
The CPJ has documented 186 journalist deaths in the Gaza war. Out of these, 178 were Palestinians killed by Israel.
Western politicians like to describe violence that they have no intention of doing anything to stop “senseless.” There was nothing senseless about what Israel did. The country’s military and its troll acolytes on social media spent months demonizing and defaming Anas, in an attempt to justify his eventual murder and to discredit his courageous reporting on Israel’s starvation of Gaza. His last report was at a hospital in Gaza, standing as he often did as a witness of carnage, before the emaciated bodies of starving children. He was reporting on the latest figures, that the number of dead from famine and malnutrition had risen to 217 civilians, including a hundred children.
“This hospital is receiving children daily due to the famine, malnutrition, and lack of milk, and the spread of infections and illnesses inside the Gaza Strip,” he said, as an emaciated infant writhed in the background.
Israel is feeling immense diplomatic pressure over its deliberate starvation of an entire Palestinian enclave. It also continues to suffer no real consequences for the ways in which it carries out its war. So it killed one of the most recognizable faces relaying this atrocity to the world.
Israel’s strategy appears to mimic that infamous Khmer Rouge slogan: “To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.”
I have long maintained to friends and acquaintances who asked me about the emotional toll of covering war and death that writing was a therapeutic act, one that consigned the demons that threatened to annihilate my belief in the basic goodness of humanity every day to words that flowed out of my pen and keyboard and onto pages and screens. The tepid format of breaking news ameliorated and dulled the pain when the echoes of a child’s scream or a mother’s wail would take residence in the confines of my mind.
There is nothing therapeutic about this. There is just rage, anguish, grief. Failing words, failing heart, failing mind.
I keep going back to a photograph of Anas on social media, hair combed, a half-smile weighed down by the depths of the depravity he was witnessing every day, holding his two children, framed in the background by rubble that is out of focus, as if the bliss and joy of clutching his two babies as they hold hands has rendered meaningless all and every other aspect of a crumbling world. A moment that captures a love so eternal and pure that surely it will echo well past this cataclysm.
It is a tragedy beyond recount, however, that this faint echo is all his children will retain of their father, a memory of a candle’s warmth in the gaping abyss of international inaction.
Why? How could they?
Then I think to myself, having remained human over the past two years, well of course they would. It doesn’t matter to them that the entire world is raging because they’re starving children.
Perhaps it is precisely because the world is watching that they did this. Perhaps it is a boastful demonstration of impunity.
No price has been paid. Even in the midst of Israel’s greatest purported diplomatic crisis, it felt no compunction about wiping out an entire crew of journalists to augment its daily death toll of starving children. No weapons embargo, no sanctions, no trials, not even the veneer of an internal investigation, because why would they? They said they killed him.
No price paid but their own humanity.
But the thing is, Anas al-Sharif lived. And his life had meaning, dreams and value. Yes, his life was bracketed by tragedy, by endless war. He knew siege, deprivation, starvation, carnage, conflagration.
But he also knew what it felt like to plant a kiss on the cheek of his daughter, to hold his son’s hand, and he knew what it felt like to live a life of courage, truth, of standing up for the oppressed and marginalized, of telling their stories and persisting through fear and the annihilation of everything he held dear. Of being a true journalist.
“I urge you not to let chains silence you, nor borders restrain you,” he wrote in a farewell message that was released after his death, as per instruction he had given. “Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland. I entrust you to take care of my family. I entrust you with my beloved daughter Sham, the light of my eyes, whom I never got the chance to watch grow up as I had dreamed. I entrust you with my dear son Salah, whom I had wished to support and accompany through life until he grew strong enough to carry my burden and continue the mission.”
“Do not forget Gaza… And do not forget me in your sincere prayers for forgiveness and acceptance,” he concluded.
He shouldn’t have had to endure all this, or carry its weight on his shoulders, but he did. And we will remember.
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