Two unions, the NewsGuild-CWA and the National Writers Union, representing more than 27,000 journalists and other workers, are demanding Israel be held accountable for the recent killing of five Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza.
In a joint statement, the two uions accused Israel of deliberately targeting journalists in order “to erase evidence and prevent accountability for war crimes.”
On Sunday, an Israeli airstrike near the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City killed Al Jazeera correspondents Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh, cameramen Ibrahim Zaher and Moamen Aliwa, and their assistant Mohammed Noufal.
Al-Sharif–who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2024 for breaking news photography – has long been accused by Israeli officials of being a Hamas operative, accusations that the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Al Jazeera denounced.
“Israel has repeatedly made similar unproven claims without producing credible evidence,” the CPJ said in an October 2024 social media post.
The CPJ noted that after Al Jazeera correspondent Ismail al-Ghoul was killed in July 2024, the IDF produced a document that “contained contradictory information” that al-Ghoul received a Hamas military ranking in 2007. Al-Ghoul was born in 1997 and would have been 10 years old at the time.
Closed Al Jazeera offices
In May 2024, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet voted unanimously to forcibly close Al Jazeera’s offices within Israel and ban the news company’s broadcasts, citing national security concerns. Earlier this year, far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir went so far as to call for the arrest of anyone caught watching Al Jazeera.
In an interview with BBC News, the CPJ’s CEO, Jodie Ginsburg, described the “smears” leveled against al-Sharif as “a precursor to his assassination.”
With Sunday’s airstrike, 192 journalists have been killed over the last 22 months, including at least 184 Palestinian journalists killed by Israel, according to the CPJ.
“More journalists and media workers have been killed in the Israel-Gaza war than at any other point in recent years,” said Jon Schleuss, president of the NewsGuild-CWA. “Journalists and media workers should be able to do their jobs safely to report to the world the news we need to know. Our job is to interrogate on behalf of the truth and to challenge those uncomfortable being held to account. Ethical journalism demands that we provide a voice to the voiceless and journalists strive to do that every day.”
In their joint statement, the unions called for an independent investigation into Sunday’s airstrike and said “those responsible must be prosecuted.”
“There are no words to describe our outrage over the murder of Anas Al-Sharif and his colleagues as the Israelis boast of their war crimes and genocide in Gaza,” said Larry Goldbetter, president of the National Writers Union. “Journalists in the U.S. are acutely aware of and sickened by these actions. NWU and the 140 unions of the IFJ from every corner of the world stand in total solidarity with the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate and the people of Gaza. The international solidarity of media workers, and all workers, will prove stronger than the horrors we witness today.”
In the last days of his life, al-Sharif and his colleagues reported on the ongoing famine conditions in the Gaza Strip that threaten the lives of its inhabitants.
Access to food and other essential items “has plummeted to unprecedented levels” and the “worst-case scenario of a famine” is currently playing out in Gaza, according to a July alert from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) platform.
One in three people in Gaza go without food for days at a time, and more than 20,000 children were medically treated for malnutrition between April and mid-July, including 3,000 “severely malnourished” children, the IPC alert states.
The alert follows a May 2025 IPC analysis that projected catastrophic levels of food insecurity for Gaza’s entire population by September.
The alert states that only an immediate and unconditional ceasefire that allows an unimpeded, large-scale humanitarian response can prevent “further deaths and catastrophic human suffering” in Gaza.
As of writing, the total number of starvation-related deaths in Gaza is 227, including more than 100 children.
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