The Extermination of Gaza City Must Not Be Televised: A Conversation with Mohammad Alsaafin

AJ+ senior producer Mohammad Alsaafin speaks on the killing of Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif and Israel's plans to occupy Gaza City.

Anas al-Sharif in his last live report for Al Jazeera, reporting on infants dying from malnutrition due to famine in a Gaza City hospital. al-Sharif would be assassinated in a targeted Israeli airstrike, along with his colleagues, 10 hours after this aired. Source: Al Jazeera Arabic

On August 8, after more than 10 hours of deliberation, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet approved plans to seize Gaza City and occupy it. The shape of the projected invasion continues to be doled out piecemeal to the press, but Israel’s government says, at least to Western observers, that it does not intend to annex the Strip, but to give over control of the territory to a future, non-Israeli, civil administration, but where the IDF retains “security control.”

As far-right ministers in the government now argue about whether Netanyahu is undertaking half-measures because he won’t commit to full annexation, Gaza City came under heavy bombardment last night, capped by an assassination strike against the al-Jazeera Bureau in Gaza, targeting Anas al-Sharif and 4 others whom he worked with outside the gates of al-Shifa Hospital.

I spoke with Mohammad Alsaafin, a senior producer at AJ+, about Anas al-Sharif’s killing, the treatment of Palestinian journalists by the Western media, how Netanyahu’s current plans for Gaza City are distinct from previous plans, and if a “day after” the Gaza war is even something Israel envisions.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Séamus: Anas al-Sharif was murdered shortly before we started speaking. The war on Gaza has seen the most deaths of journalists in any conflict ever, all of them directly assassinated by Israel. But this has been the most high-profile murder, I think, of them all, him being killed alongside seemingly the entire al-Jazeera bureau. What do do you see as the intention of doing this before the IDF's planned operation to seize Gaza City?

Mohammad: The easy answer is that they want to silence the most prominent journalists who have been covering events in Gaza City for the last two years, the ones who refused to evacuate and stayed behind even as much of the north of Gaza was depopulated, the ones who refused to stop reporting. And this obviously became extremely high profile because the previous al-Jazeera bureau chief in Gaza City, one of the most well-known journalists in the Arab world, Wael al-Dahdouh, left Gaza a couple of months into this genocide.

Wael's family was killed, his grandson, several of his children, his wife were killed in an Israeli airstrike in [October] 2023. [In January 2024] his son, also a producer with Al Jazeera, was targeted by an Israeli drone strike that killed him. [In December 2023] Wael was himself severely injured in an Israeli attack that killed his cameraman, Samer Abu Daqqa. It was after that that Wael finally decided to leave Gaza. At that point, he had already evacuated Gaza City and gone south, leaving Anas and Ismail al-Ghoul, two 20-something-year-old journalists, to pick up the slack, and over the next year, they did heroic work.

Anas' dad was also killed in [December] 2023. His 65-year-old father had gone back to the family home in Jabalia, the family had fled earlier, he'd gone back to pick up some things from the house and was killed there. I remember Anas with his family praying over their father's body and then burying him in a temporary grave because it was too dangerous to reach a cemetery at the time. And Anas went back to work on air the very next day. And that's been his M.O. [since].

When his close friend and colleague Ismail al-Ghoul was assassinated in July last year, Anas kept the flame burning. He buried Ismail, and then he went back to work. When the third member of the Al Jazeera crew, Hossam Shabat, the 23-year-old, was also assassinated in [March] of this year, it was the same thing. And the journalist who was killed alongside Anas, Mohammed Qreiqeh, he picked up the mantle after Ismail was killed. One after the other.