This is my will and my final message. If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice.

First, peace be upon you and Allah’s mercy and blessings. Allah knows I gave every effort and all my strength to be a support and a voice for my people, ever since I opened my eyes to life in the alleys and streets of the Jabaliya refugee camp. My hope was that Allah would extend my life so I could return with my family and loved ones to our original town of occupied Asqalan (al-Majdal). But Allah’s will came first, and His decree is final.

I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification – so that Allah may bear witness against those who stayed silent, those who accepted our killing, those who choked our breath, and whose hearts were unmoved by the scattered remains of our children and women, doing nothing to stop the massacre that our people have faced for more than a year and a half. [Continue reading…]

Kareem Shaheen writes:

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 IDF’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 we have become by lies.

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. [Continue reading…]