DOHA, August 11. /TASS/. Four Al Jazeera journalists including correspondent Anas al-Sharif have been killed in an Israeli air strike on Gaza City, Qatar’s TV channel said.
The journalists were in a tent for media workers outside al-Shifa Hospital when the strike using a drone was launched minutes before midnight local time (GMT +3), killing seven people.
In turn, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had struck "the terrorist Anas Al-Sharif, who posed as a journalist for the Al Jazeera network." According to the Israeli military, he led a terrorist cell in the radical Palestinian movement and "was responsible for advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF troops."
According to the TV channel, its journalists were among 48 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip over the past day. The Palestinian enclave said on August 5 that the number of reporters killed there had risen above 230. And the Gaza Health Ministry reported on August 10 that the total death toll since the Gaza conflict escalated in October 2023 had climbed to 61,430, with more than 153,000 people injured.
The situation in the Middle East deteriorated sharply after armed supporters of the Palestinian Hamas movement from the Gaza Strip entered Israeli territory on October 7, 2023, killing residents of border settlements and taking hostages. The radicals called this attack a response to Israel’s actions against the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Israel blockaded Gaza and launched a military operation in the strip to free the hostages and dismantle Hamas’s fighting capability. In March, Israel resumed fighting in the Gaza Strip, breaking a ceasefire established in January. Several rounds of negotiations mediated by Qatar, Egypt, and the United States failed.