One year without Anas al-Sharif, Gaza's voice to the world

“If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice.”

Those were among the final words left by Anas Al Sharif, the Palestinian journalist who spent nearly two years reporting the war from Gaza.

One year ago today, Israel killed him.

Anas, 28, was an Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent and a son of Jabalia refugee camp, which he proudly called home. For 22 months, he documented life in northern Gaza, reporting the deaths of others while facing the same threat himself.

Why Anas mattered as a journalist

As thousands of Palestinians fled Gaza City and the northern part of the Strip, Anas chose to remain in Jabalia, the refugee camp where he had grown up and to which he remained deeply connected.

As much of northern Gaza fell silent, his reports became one of the few remaining windows into what was happening there.

From hospitals, streets and tents, Anas spent 22 months reporting on the lives and deaths of those who remained.

Before joining Al Jazeera, he worked as a volunteer photojournalist for several local Palestinian news outlets, documenting life in Gaza from the ground. In November 2023, he joined Al Jazeera and continued reporting from the Strip.

A journalism graduate of Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, Anas had dreamed of becoming an international photographer. Instead, the war turned him into one of Gaza’s most recognisable journalists and, ultimately, one of its most prominent journalists to be killed.

But Anas’s importance did not come only from the massive following he had built. It came from the circumstances in which he continued to report: he was telling the story of a war he was trying to survive himself.

He was hungry, yet he reported on hunger. He was under fire, yet he kept filming the destruction. He was exhausted, yet he continued documenting the tired faces of those around him. He was not reporting from a distance; he was living through the same conditions he was showing the world.

On 10 August, at around 10 p.m., as hunger and starvation continued to grip the Strip, a powerful blast shook the area around Al-Shifa Hospital, where journalists had established a tent from which they worked.

News soon emerged that five Al Jazeera journalists had been killed in an Israeli strike on the tent. Anas was among them.

Also killed were Mohammed Qreiqeh, 33, an Al Jazeera correspondent; cameramen Ibrahim Zaher, 25, and Moamen Aliwa; and Mohammed Noufal, 29, another cameraman.

Five journalists who had spent the war documenting the lives and deaths of others were killed in a single strike.

The families paid the cost

Before the world knew Anas Al Sharif as a journalist, he was a husband, a father, a son and a friend, an ordinary person whose life extended far beyond the camera and the news.

"My heart is full of emotions. First of all, I miss you," his wife, Bayan, wrote in an Instagram post two days ago, remembering one of the last messages she exchanged with Anas.

To Bayan, Anas was a beloved husband. To his two children, he was simply their father. Their daughter, Sham, is four years old. Their son, Salah, was born during the war, his age now measured by the same years that took his father away.

In the final testament Anas left behind, he entrusted Sham to those who would remain after him: "I entrust you with my beloved daughter Sham, the light of my eyes, whom I never got the chance to watch grow up as I had dreamed."

After his death, Bayan shared that Sham began sending voice messages towards the sky, hoping her father could somehow hear them.

“I help my mom every day, and I miss you,” she said in one of those messages.

For a four-year-old girl, the absence of her father has become something she tries to speak across the distance between life and death.

For Bayan, 10 August is not only the anniversary of Anas’s death. It is also her birthday.

Anas had promised they would celebrate it together. Instead, a date that was supposed to mark another year of her life became the date she would forever remember as the day his ended.

The world grieved Anas and the four other journalists, their names filling headlines and social media after the attack. But for their families, they were not primarily eyewitnesses to a war or journalists whose reporting had reached millions.

They were husbands, fathers, sons and loved ones.

In the aftermath, Al Jazeera helped evacuate the families of the five journalists killed that night, Anas, Mohammed, Moamen, Ibrahim and Noufal, to Doha.

On 25 November 2025, the Qatari Embassy evacuated dozens of their family members from Gaza, around 50 people, allowing them and their children to reach safety.

But the evacuation could not change what had already been lost. They left Gaza carrying their grief with them and leaving behind the graves of those they had lost.

A personal loss for all Gaza

For Palestinians in Gaza, the loss felt bigger than that of a journalist. Anas had become a voice and a witness for people whose lives were increasingly cut off from the outside world.

He stood among the people he reported on and carried their stories to audiences far beyond Gaza. His presence meant that even as northern Gaza became increasingly isolated, someone remained there to document what was happening.

That role became even more important as Israel continued to bar foreign journalists from freely entering Gaza, leaving Palestinian journalists inside the Strip to provide much of the reporting reaching the outside world.

When Anas and the other journalists were killed, the loss was therefore felt not only professionally but personally across Gaza.

Starvation was reaching its peak, and Israel’s plans for the occupation and control of Gaza were becoming an immediate reality. Palestinian journalists who had documented the war from its earliest days were being killed one by one.

For many Palestinians, the fear was not only that Anas had been killed, but that Gaza would have to continue facing the war with one fewer voice documenting it.

A year later, that absence remains.

Our voice has grown quieter. We do not feel that the world is paying the same attention to us, or caring in the same way it did when Anas was one of the people carrying our voices beyond Gaza.

More than 265 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, making it the deadliest conflict for journalists in modern history.

They had spent the war using their voices, cameras and reporting to document the lives of Palestinians around them while living through bombardment, displacement, hunger and loss themselves.

Anas’s death generated widespread attention on social media and in international headlines. But that attention eventually moved elsewhere. For his family, colleagues and the Palestinians whose lives he documented, the loss did not.

Perhaps that is why his final words still matter.

In his testament to the world and to his people, Anas wrote: “I urge you not to let chains silence you, nor 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.”

A year after Anas Al- Sharif death, his voice may no longer reach the world through his camera, but one question remains: when will international law protect the journalists in Palestine? 

Sara Awad is a Palestinian writer. Her work has been published in The Intercept, Al Jazeera English, TRT World, Middle East Eye, Drop Site News, The Independent, Truthout, PRISM, We Are Not Numbers, The Electronic Intifada, as well as the Italian outlets Domani, Il Manifesto, and Kritica, and the Spanish magazine El Salto. Passionate about capturing human experiences and amplifying underreported stories, she focuses on social issues, resilience, identity, and hope amid the ongoing realities of war and occupation.