Letter: Media is Complicit in Israel’s Unprecedented Assault on Journalists

The following letter was sent to local media outlets on July 31, 2026.

August 10th marks the martyrdom of Anas Al-Sharif, the honorable Al-Jazeera journalist who was murdered by the Israeli Occupation Forces. We honor his life by calling upon his colleagues, fellow journalists, to take up the mantle of truth that he carried and report on the crimes against humanity aided and abetted by Israel and Zionist interest groups.

Israel has murdered more than 260 journalists through targeted air strikes, quadcopter drone attacks, “double tap” strikes, infantry, and armored attack vehicles. It has openly characterized journalists as armed combatants, attempted to demonize their reporting, and even openly listed them as “terror” targets. Israel has been the largest killer of journalists (see also here and here) in any modern historical event.

Genocide is a concerted effort and requires more than just arms but a deliberate act of revisionism, denialism, dehumanization and vilification. There are many facets: supplying, executing, administering, and manufacturing consent for genocide. Mainstream media played along with Israeli-American state propaganda in obfuscating the reality on the ground of Gaza, and failing to hold public officials accountable. Journalism that regurgitates state lines is only a mouthpiece of those in power rather than a lens that brings clarity to stories and delivers truth. Stories worth telling have always been about getting the voice of those disempowered to the people in order to allow those who stand for good and justice, the majority of people, to rise up against the tide of tyranny.

Mainstream media has failed the people of Gaza, failed their fellow citizens, and failed truth. In Anas Al-Sharif’s final testimony, he opens with,

“I have lived pain in all its details, and I have tasted grief and loss time and again. Yet despite this, I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without falsification or distortion, so that God would bear witness over those who stayed silent, those who accepted our killing, and over those who choked off our breath and whose hearts were unmoved by the torn bodies of our children and women, and who did nothing to stop the massacre that our people have faced for more than a year and a half.”

It has now been three years. Sharif’s words are a responsibility and burden on his colleagues like you, to tell the truth despite Zionist pressure.

The genocide is still ongoing — the lies have enabled a fire across the region with ethnic cleansing in Lebanon and a belligerent war with Iran. You still hold a duty. I call upon you on this anniversary to do the following:

  1. Resume and sustain coverage of the news from Gaza and Palestine, to document Israel’s war crimes on the global stage.
  2. Call for the protection of Palestinian and Lebanese journalists, who continue facing daily targeting by the occupation. Honor your own colleagues: publicly name and account for the Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza.
  3. Use honest and consistent language to report truthfully about the reality of the conditions on the ground and Israel’s policy of mass displacement and killing of the Palestinian people.
  4. Demand Israel lift the ban on independent foreign press access to Gaza.

Jennifer Scarlott

Jennifer Scarlott is a Northampton, Massachusetts-based organizer working with River Valley for Palestine and Western Mass. Coalition for Palestine.