"Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland."
Palestine Will Be Free
August 11, 2025
Palestine Will Be Free
August 11, 2025
Anas al-Sharif had been an abiding constant during the nearly two years of the ongoing Gaza genocide. Documenting massacres, reporting on the Israeli-imposed famine, carrying the corpses of his martyred colleagues, caring for the wounded, consoling families, making appeals to the deaf and blind world, and often preparing for his own impending martyrdom, in many ways Anas came to embody the brutal extermination campaign against his people. The enduring image of him, talking to the camera with a vacant thousand-yard stare as a fire raged in the background in the aftermath of yet another Israeli bombing, is a neat encapsulation of his life over the past two years. Calm (even while reporting on the murder of his own family members), mild-mannered, gentle, and kind, Anas also encapsulated the people he loved so dearly and reported on the annihilation of.
Hours after his brutal murder last night at the hands of the Israeli barbarians, it still hasn’t sunk in that I am writing about Anas in the past tense. A visit to his Twitter timeline brought one up to date with the latest episode in Israeli savagery. Now that timeline will no longer be updated by the inimitable reporter, who achieved more in just 28 years of his life than the millionaire propagandists who pose as journalists, selling us the latest lies of their paymasters from swanky studios. Anas didn’t broadcast from a cushy chair in an air-conditioned office with the opening lines “Good evening, our top story tonight...” before moving on to jokes and banter with professional yappers. Anas was in the crucible. He reported from the latest tent massacre in the middle of the night and from the smouldering rubble that had crushed another dozen children earlier that morning. He was at the hospital when it was being besieged and bombarded, and at the annihilation of another abandoned school long since serving as a shelter for people rendered homeless. Anas was the voice of Gaza. He was its face: broken, but determined. And hopeful. The voice of a people the world has refused to hear. Still, he persisted — determined to tell the stories of his people in the hope of saving whatever and whoever remained, long after it became routine for Palestinians to bury more than a hundred of their own every single day for nearly 700 days.
Read more on Palestine Will be Free in Substack.
Hours after his brutal murder last night at the hands of the Israeli barbarians, it still hasn’t sunk in that I am writing about Anas in the past tense. A visit to his Twitter timeline brought one up to date with the latest episode in Israeli savagery. Now that timeline will no longer be updated by the inimitable reporter, who achieved more in just 28 years of his life than the millionaire propagandists who pose as journalists, selling us the latest lies of their paymasters from swanky studios. Anas didn’t broadcast from a cushy chair in an air-conditioned office with the opening lines “Good evening, our top story tonight...” before moving on to jokes and banter with professional yappers. Anas was in the crucible. He reported from the latest tent massacre in the middle of the night and from the smouldering rubble that had crushed another dozen children earlier that morning. He was at the hospital when it was being besieged and bombarded, and at the annihilation of another abandoned school long since serving as a shelter for people rendered homeless. Anas was the voice of Gaza. He was its face: broken, but determined. And hopeful. The voice of a people the world has refused to hear. Still, he persisted — determined to tell the stories of his people in the hope of saving whatever and whoever remained, long after it became routine for Palestinians to bury more than a hundred of their own every single day for nearly 700 days.
Read more on Palestine Will be Free in Substack.