On the night of August 10, 2025, the air over Gaza City hung heavy with dust and the steady thrum of generators. In a modest press tent pitched outside the bomb-scarred shell of al-Shifa Hospital, Al Jazeera’s last reporting team in the city worked with the quiet urgency of people who knew each second could be their last chance to bear witness. Cameras waited on tripods. Laptops glowed on folding tables. There were no sandbags or armed guards, only the visible markings of the press, meant to signal protection under the laws of war.

Al Jazeera, a Qatar-based global news network, has kept a permanent presence in Gaza for years, often reporting from places other international media could not reach. The network has long faced hostility from Israeli officials, who have accused it of bias and threatened to shutter its Jerusalem bureau. Al Jazeera has rejected these accusations, pointing to its record of reporting from all sides of the conflict. During this war, with foreign reporters barred from entering without Israeli military escort, its local Palestinian journalists became one of the few remaining sources of independent, on-the-ground coverage from inside the enclave. Their reports, footage, and interviews were carried not only to millions of viewers across the Arab-speaking world but also by major global outlets.

Inside the tent sat Anas al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, and Moamen Aliwa. Minutes later, an Israeli missile struck the tent. The Israeli military admitted targeting the site, alleging al-Sharif was a Hamas cell leader. No independent evidence has confirmed that claim. Al Jazeera stated that this was a targeted assassination.

The blast did more than tear through canvas and steel. It silenced the final independent voices still reporting from Gaza City. When you kill the witness, you kill the story. And when the story dies, accountability dies with it. This was not an isolated tragedy. It was part of a pattern that, measured across the war, has made Gaza the deadliest place on Earth for journalists in the modern record.

The deliberate killing of multiple journalists from a single, reputable newsroom is not without precedent. Each time it happens, it marks a rupture in the global record. In 1975, the Balibo Five were executed in East Timor to prevent them from reporting on Indonesia’s invasion. In 2009, the Maguindanao Massacre claimed 32 reporters in the Philippines, the largest single-day killing of journalists in history, as a warning to all who might challenge local power. In 2012, American correspondent Marie Colvin was killed when Syrian forces shelled a known media center in Homs. In Nazi Germany and under Stalin’s Soviet Union, many journalists were imprisoned, exiled, or executed for defying the state narrative, their deaths folded into broader purges and wartime atrocities. The tent strike in Gaza now stands in this grim lineage, a calculated act to silence witnesses and send a message to the world that there are places you will not be allowed to see.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports at least 192 journalist deaths since October 7, 2023: 184 Palestinian, 2 Israeli, and 6 Lebanese, as of August 11, 2025. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) counts at least 195 media workers killed. Gaza’s Government Media Office claims 238, while the Costs of War Project at Brown University documents about 232 through late March 2025. These totals vary depending on whether the counts include foreign correspondents, media support staff, or missing journalists presumed dead.

Even the lowest confirmed total makes this the deadliest conflict for journalists in CPJ’s record, surpassing all others in speed and density of loss. From October 7, 2023, through August 11, 2025, an average of about 8 to 9 journalists per month have been killed, totaling 192 deaths. For comparison, during the entire U.S. war in Iraq, which lasted more than eight years, CPJ recorded 204 journalists and media workers killed. Both figures are from CPJ’s database, using the same definitions for journalists and media workers. Each number is a human being with a family, colleagues, and a record of truths that now stops mid-sentence. The IFJ estimates that more than 10% of Gaza’s entire journalist corps has been killed.

Such a pattern does not happen by accident. The scale and pace of these deaths suggest an intentional effort to remove those who can create an independent record of the war.

The first casualty is often the truth. In Gaza, it is the truth tellers. These deaths are not the inevitable byproduct of a chaotic battlefield. They result from deliberate decisions to remove those most capable of documenting events and holding perpetrators to account.

The pattern is well known: Eliminate independent eyes, leaving only the account sanctioned by those in power, seal off the site, and eliminate evidence until only the official version remains. This is not only about shaping opinion in the moment. In war crimes tribunals, journalistic photographs, videos, and testimonies have been used as evidence, making those who capture them a direct threat to impunity. United Nations Special Rapporteur Irene Khan has said that attacks on journalists fit into a global pattern of repression that undermines democracy. In Gaza, this sequence is already well underway.

If those with the cameras are gone, who decides what the rest of us see?

The press corps’ decimation forms the outer wall of a larger project. Human rights groups warn that this campaign seeks the political and demographic erasure of the 5.4 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, with displacement, imprisonment, and disenfranchisement on a mass scale. The methods are familiar: trap communities in “no exit” zones, dismantle life-sustaining infrastructure, close borders, and silence those who can bear witness. History shows that when the heart of a people is targeted, the tremors do not stop at its borders. They move outward, altering the lives of kin and communities far beyond the place where the attack began.

History shows what follows when the witnesses are gone. In the Balkans, in Syria, in Myanmar, the absence of independent eyes allowed perpetrators to dictate the record and insist their version was the only truth.

The strike on the al-Shifa tent happened before the last neighborhoods went quiet. In wars where mass displacement or worse is contemplated, silencing independent reporting is often an early operational step. Sarajevo’s television studios were shelled into darkness. In Aleppo, journalists were hunted through the rubble. In Myanmar, reporters documenting the Rohingya crisis were jailed or killed.

The reason rarely changes: Without witnesses, atrocities can be denied, timelines rewritten, and casualty counts reduced to rumor. In that vacuum, truth becomes whatever those in power decide it should be. If those with the cameras are gone, who decides what the rest of us see?

The elimination of journalists is not only about restricting information. It is about shaping the emotional terrain of the conflict. Each killing sends a message to the surviving press that they are not protected and that their work makes them targets. This is psychological warfare, aimed not just at reporters but at the........

© Common Dreams