Shaniyat Turani

The killing of Gaza’s most prominent reporter is not just the silencing of a voice — it is an attack on the very act of bearing witness, aided by the silence of Western media and the complicity of Arab regimes. 

Anas al-Sharif once read the names of his own family killed in an airstrike — live on air — and kept reporting. He stood where the bombs fell, speaking with a calm that carried the weight of a people under siege. He was not chasing headlines. He was the headline because Gaza would not let him be anything else. On August 10, 2025, Israel killed him near al-Shifa Hospital and tried to strip him of his credibility. They called him a militant and offered no proof that could survive daylight. He was a father, a son of Gaza, and a witness to its most unbearable hours. 

I remember the image of him during the short ceasefire, when the people of Gaza lifted him onto their shoulders. They removed his vest and helmet as if to peel away the war, even for a moment. In that instant, he was not only a journalist. He was Gaza’s voice. A man who carried their pain and their dignity through every broadcast. His reporting was a refusal to let bombs and blockades erase humanity. 

While Anas stood in the fire, many Western newsrooms looked away. They filed clean copy that washed the blood from the streets. They balanced language that did not deserve balance, calling it a conflict as if equal forces were at play. Silence was not ignorance — it was a choice. A calculation to preserve access, to avoid upsetting the powerful. And in that choice, they helped erase the very witness they claim to be. 

The betrayal went deeper. In Riyadh, a journalist’s body was once turned into a warning, and that warning still stands. Mohammed bin Salman buys silence with one hand and destroys it with the other. Jordan likewise cracks down on journalists who question their government’s open ties to the Zionist occupation. They muzzle anyone who dares to name Gaza, because Gaza forces them to face their own complicity. 

I cannot write about Anas without recalling my own nights in places where the sky is hostile. I have stood in Palestine and seen bodies drop when Israeli soldiers aimed for them. I have spent nights in Beirut hearing drones hum above until the sound became the air itself. I would pray to wake to another morning, another chance to report. I know what it is to live with the knowledge that tomorrow is not promised, and still to step outside because the story matters more than your own pulse. 

To forget him is to let the silence win. To remember him is to defy it. I will say his name, and I will say what killed him. Because the truth is a body now, and we are responsible for its proper burial. 

Shaniyat Turani is an investigative journalist reporting on U.S. Foreign Policy in West Asia.