Anas Al-Sharif
Anas Al-Sharif was a Palestinian journalist from Jabalia Camp, Northern Gaza. He worked as a volunteer photographer journalist for many local Palestinian news outlets. In November 2023, he joined Al Jazeera Media Network as a correspondent in Gaza amplifying the voices of Palestinians and covering the news during the genocide in Gaza perpetrated by Israeli authorities. Anas Al-Sharif also used his social media platforms to document Israeli war crimes. In 2024, Amnesty International Australia awarded Anas Al-Sharif a Human Rights Defender Award.
Due to his journalistic work documenting violations and the growing starvation, Anas Al-Sharif received numerous threats and in December 2023, his father was killed in an Israeli airstrike that directly targeted their family house. Since October 2024 he was subjected to targeted public threats and smear campaigns led by Israeli officials and social media accounts, including IDF spokesperson Avichay Adraee.
Anas Al-sharif was killed on 10 August 2025 along with five other journalists in a direct airstike by IDF on their tent near to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
“If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice... 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.”
Human rights defenders in the OPT are subjected to acts of harassment, restrictions on freedom of movement, stigmatisation, abductions, long periods of arbitrary detention usually under administrative detention orders, illegal searches of their homes and offices and killings. Many of the violations are state-sanctioned, or if not sanctioned at the highest levels of the Israeli political and military establishment, then condoned by the ongoing policy of impunity which permeates the military and judicial system in relation to the OPT. In some instances Israeli settlers have also been the perpetrators of violence against human rights defenders.
