For almost three weeks now, the Israeli army has been carrying out a highly violent military operation against northern Gaza, shelling and besieging the region with the goal of emptying it of its residents. The situation is unfolding behind closed doors: Israel has prevented foreign journalists from entering the enclave for over a year, communication lines are cut off and many Palestinian journalists have now left the area themselves. On Wednesday, October 23, Israel intensified this media blackout by accusing six of the Palestinian journalists still working in the region of being fighters or veterans of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both designated terrorist organizations by the European Union.

All those accused work for the Qatari news channel Al-Jazeera. Among them are two of Gaza's best-known faces, Anas al-Sharif, 27, and Hossam Shabat, 23, who have been broadcasting live every day for the past year on television screens across the Arab world. The Israeli military claims to have obtained documents – the authenticity of which Le Monde could not verify – from Hamas and Islamic Jihad computers seized in Gaza. According to these documents, al-Sharif, Shabat, Ismail Abu Omar and Talal Arrouki are allegedly linked to Hamas, while Ashraf Saraj and Alaa Salameh are identified as an infantry soldier and deputy director of combat propaganda for Islamic Jihad, respectively.

"These are blatant lies," Shabat told Le Monde. "The [Israeli] occupation is trying to justify the fact that, if journalists are targeted, it's because they are combatants. We continue our work, our priority is to spread the truth about what the occupation army is doing today in the north of the Gaza Strip." His colleague al-Sharif also denied any link with any movement. "The occupation army has repeatedly tried to silence us with death and fire, either by targeting my house and killing my father, or by repeatedly targeting us," he wrote on his X account.

Al-Jazeera has rejected these "fabricated accusations," but on October 24, the Israeli army responded with additional documents, which also could not be independently verified. According to these documents, the military accused Al-Jazeera of having maintained "close cooperation" with Hamas, with whom it had allegedly planned to establish a "secure line of communication." The reports released by the Israeli army indicate that the Islamist movement ruling Gaza had given specific instructions to Al-Jazeera to minimize media coverage of a failed rocket attack by Islamic Jihad and, more generally, to avoid criticizing Hamas and Islamic Jihad during a brief confrontation with Israel in 2022.

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