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On August 10, 2025, Al Jazeera staff—correspondents Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh, cameramen Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal—were killed in a deliberate drone strike in a media tent sheltering journalists outside the main gate of Gaza City in al-Shifa Hospital. Others were killed, among them were freelance cameraman Moamen Aliwa and freelance journalist Mohammed al-Khaldi.

The supposed deliberateness of this strike is founded on the previous killings of Al Jazeera staff such as Hossam Shabat in March of 2025, Ahmed al-Louh in December of 2024, Ismail al-Ghoul in July of 2024, Hamza Dahdouh in January of 2024, and Sameh Abudaq in December of 2023.

Multiple sources have criticized the conflict as being one of the most dangerous for media workers and journalists.

“Since [the] Hamas attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, and the subsequent invasion, more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed. This includes at least 195 journalists and media workers, a mortality rate of over ten per cent – dramatically higher than any other occupational group,” said the International Federation of Journalists.

Furthermore, the project Costs of War from Brown University writes that the number of journalists killed in the US Civil War, the first and second World Wars, the Korean War, the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the wars of former Yugoslavia, war in Afghanistan in after 2001, and the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, the killings in Gaza since October 7, 2023 remains higher than all of them combined.

In response, human rights activists in the EU and UN experts condemned the killings. The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines also made an official statement of solidarity with their journalist and media colleagues in Gaza, and expressed condemnation for the Israeli government’s continued attacks. 

Globally, critics continue to protest and challenge the Israeli government’s continued weaponization of starvation amidst the bombing. The UN World Food Programme said that hunger and malnutrition levels in Gaza are the highest ever recorded, with more than one-third of the  besieged population going without food for days, as Israel’s siege continues to halt aid deliveries. 500,000 people in Gaza are said to be on the brink of famine.

At time of publishing, the Israeli government plans for further military occupation of the Gaza Strip without a solution to starvation.

The following is an excerpt of a final message written by the slain 28-year-old Palestinian journalist and Al Jazeera correspondent, the well-known Anas al-Sharif, written to be released posthumously (and can be found here in full):

“Do not let chains silence you or borders restrain you. Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland.”

By Pocholo Tolentino

(Image source: Bashar Taleb/AFP News)