For almost three weeks, the Israeli army has been carrying out an extremely violent military operation against the northern Gaza Strip, shelling and besieging the region in an attempt to drive it away from its residents. The situation is happening behind closed doors: Israel has been denying foreign journalists access to the enclave for over a year, communication channels have been interrupted and many Palestinian journalists have now left the area themselves. On Wednesday, October 23, Israel intensified this media blockade by accusing six of the Palestinian journalists still working in the region of being fighters or veterans of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both of which have been designated as terrorist organizations by the European Union.

All defendants work for the Qatari news channel Al-Jazeera. Among them are two of Gaza’s most recognizable faces, Anas al-Sharif, 27, and Hossam Shabat, 23, who have been broadcasting live on television screens across the Arab world every day for a year. The Israeli military claims to have received documents – their authenticity Le Monde could not be verified – from Hamas and Islamic Jihad computers seized in Gaza. According to these documents, al-Sharif, Shabat, Ismail Abu Omar and Talal Arrouki are allegedly linked to Hamas, while Ashraf Saraj and Alaa Salameh are identified as an infantry soldier and deputy director of Islamic Jihad’s combat propaganda, respectively.

“These are blatant lies,” Shabat said Le Monde. “The (Israeli) occupation is trying to justify the fact that when journalists are targeted, it is because they are combatants. We continue our work, our priority is to spread the truth about what the occupying army is doing today in the north of the Gaza Strip.” His colleague al-Sharif also denied any connection to any movement. “The occupying army has repeatedly tried to silence us with death and fire, either by targeting my house and killing my father, or by repeatedly targeting us,” he wrote on his X account.

123 media workers were killed in one year

Al-Jazeera has denied these “fabricated allegations,” but on October 24, the Israeli army responded with additional documents that also could not be independently verified. According to the documents, the military accused Al-Jazeera of “close cooperation” with Hamas, with whom it allegedly wanted to establish a “secure line of communication.” Reports released by the Israeli army indicate that Gaza’s ruling Islamist movement gave Al-Jazeera specific instructions to minimize media coverage of a failed rocket attack by Islamic Jihad and, more generally, to criticize Hamas and the Israeli army To avoid Islamic Jihad during a brief confrontation with Israel in 2022.

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