Remembering Anas Al-Sharif, Honoring His Legacy, And Fighting For Palestine

It is impossible to know where to begin. My mind is a flood, my chest an ache I cannot unclench. The grief is not quiet, it is loud and rattling and it does not ask permission to enter.

I have never met Anas Al-Sharif, but I know him. I know the air he grew up breathing. I know the streets that we grew up playing in as children. Gaza is small like that, everyone’s footsteps eventually echo into yours.

He was only a few years older than me. We grew up minutes apart, both born into the narrow arteries of Gaza, where the sea is beautiful but caged in, where the sky is the same one that drops bombs, where you learn before you can even name it that your life could be taken at any moment.

In Gaza we are born with a knowing that there is no armour thick enough, no press vest, no degree, no accolade, no uniform, no audience or platform that can save us from being Palestinian. Death can find you in your bed, in the market, while hanging laundry, while holding a microphone. It can find you on air, live, grieving, as you call out the names of your butchered family.

Born in Jabalia refugee camp, a son of refugees from a land we are not allowed to return to, Anas Al-Sharif carried within him the inheritance of exile. For the past 675 days and counting since the start of the genocide in Gaza, Anas became the voice from the North of Gaza for Al Jazeera. His camera was a lifeline between Gaza and the rest of the world, pulling truth through the blackouts.

He reported under constant bombardment, his press vest a paper shield, holding the truth up for the world to see. Like all his colleagues, Palestinian journalists are punished for their profession. From Shireen Abu Akleh, sniped down as she was covering the violent Israeli invasion in Jenin, to Wael El Dahdouh discovering the murder of his family while live on television, later kneeling over the body of his son saying “They take revenge on us in our children?”

This is not coincidence, not collateral. It is strategy. It is the deliberate erasure of witnesses. With Israel actively blocking international media from entering into Gaza to report on the starvation and genocide while on the cusp of enacting it’s plans for a full scale of occupation of Gaza, the burden of truth falls heavily on the shoulders of Palestinians to continue to report to the world the crimes Israel is committing.

Like all the hundreds of other Palestinian journalists that have been targeted, murdered or have had their loved ones killed and maimed, the harrowing threats against Anas were relentless. From the Israeli military’s blood libel against him promising to hunt him down, to starvation and disease permeating at every corner and colleagues begging him to get out as the menacing dangers of his reality continued to press in, Anas persisted everyday to report on what was happening around him, turning down every opportunity to leave Gaza and seek safety.

Days before his murder, he told a friend through screenshots of a text exchange that were shared that “The only way I will leave Gaza is through heaven.” He had already written his will months earlier, as if he knew, as if he accepted, that his murder was inevitable.

Despite the Committee to Protect Journalists’ official international calls demanding an end to the incitement against Anas and his colleagues, the worst happened on August 10th, when an Israeli airstrike hit a media tent near Al-Shifa Hospital. It killed Anas, four of his Al Jazeera colleagues, and two civilians, including his nephew. Israel, of course, readily and gleefully claimed he was a Hamas operative. No evidence, no proof. Just the same tired script they use to justify every Palestinian death.

Because here is the truth. We are not killed for what we do. We are killed for who we are. For existing. For refusing to disappear. For holding a mic like a mirror up to their grotesque genocidal project against Palestinians.

In his final testament, Anas wrote:

“If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice. I have given everything I had to be a support and a voice for my people… I entrust you with Palestine, with her people, with her children… Do not forget Gaza. And do not forget me in your prayers.”

Anas is every Palestinian who tried to show the world the atrocities they implored us to bear witness to, and, seemingly failingly, act upon. He is every voice annihilated for speaking truth to power. He is every body marked for death for refusing to be silent and surrendering to oppressive subjugation.

And as we sit behind our screens, watching from afar through distilled headlines and soundbites that continue to manufacture our consent, Palestinians are living out the trauma of the horrors they are showing us in real time. To even attempt to conceive the strength it takes to pick up a camera or a phone in this never ending genocide, to point it toward the carnage, the scattered limbs and emaciated bodies of our loved ones, to force us to see, see, see that what is happening is real, and damning and should terrify us all.

Anas says to us: “I entrust you with Palestine, the jewel of the Muslim crown, the heartbeat of every free soul on this earth. I entrust you with her people, with her wronged little children who were denied the chance to dream, to grow, to live in peace.”

He tells us, demanding, “Do not be silenced by chains, do not be confined by borders. Be fearless in the march toward liberation until the sun of dignity and freedom rises once more over our stolen land.”

Anas, and what he represents, is a brave and valiant human being trying to warn us and guard us against the worst of humanity. His life was a warning, a plea, and a charge all at once. In him, Palestine speaks not as a distant land on a map, but as a living banner for justice and liberation that belongs to each and every one of us, no matter where we are, no matter what forces try to silence or confine us. Governments, regimes, lobbyists, policies, occupation walls, none of them erase the truth that the Palestinian struggle is everyone’s struggle.

He ended his will by asking for forgiveness for any shortcomings. That line broke me. Because it is all of us who must ask for his forgiveness, and all of Palestine’s forgiveness.

Anas was a giant. In his life and in his death, his voice is now forever immortalized, and it will remain the stain on Israel’s fragile bloodridden legacy until its inevitable dissolution, as it unmakes itself through every atrocity.

He was the embodiment of the best of humanity, even as he faced the worst of it in every waking and sleeping moment. In his final months, he lived with the knowledge that his days were numbered, that the work he was doing, speaking truth to power in a place where truth is treated like a weapon, would almost certainly kill him. And yet he chose to keep going.

For the rest of the world, Muslim, Arab, or otherwise, sitting comfortably in complacency, we must remember that heaven is full of the good, the innocent, the brave, those who loved for the sake of God, for the sake of love, who sacrificed and carried the burden of oppression and injustice time and time again. We in this lifetime did not deserve a soul like Anas, and all those who fell before him in the pursuit of honouring what it means to be Palestinian. To speak the truth. To fight against the machinery of war. To defend against the fascist grip of man, despite all the powers that conspire against us.

We have been told for decades that the truth will set us free. But the truth is that truth alone has never been enough to free Palestine. It must be carried by voices willing to risk everything, by those who know they might never see the freedom they fight for, but fight anyway. Anas carried that truth every day of his life.

His final words were not the surrender of a man defeated. They were the offering of a man who knew the price and paid it willingly. Israel may believe it succeeded in silencing him, but it has only made him eternal.

To Anas, like every Palestinian that has fallen, you are a universe that will keep expanding long after your death, and my language will always be too narrow to hold your loss.

But I won’t forget you. I will remember you rejoicing from that day back in December 2024, when you heard news of what we now know was a cruel mockery of a ceasefire, when you tore your press vest off, joy spilling across your face, as your voice broke into relief – a rare, fragile thing for our people. I am so unbelievably sorry we let you down again. I am so sorry you won’t be able to watch your Sham and Salah grow up, that they have had to grieve you and be robbed of their hero of a dad that did everything to make the world better for them.

I will carry your name and the names of all those who risk everything to keep the truth alive, in every act, every defiance, every effort to never surrender our cause. Your memory will forever be a revolution. الله يرحمك