“I experienced pain in all its details and I tasted pain and loss several times.
This is what Anas Al-Sharif wrote in his “will” prepared four months before his martyrdom. He was published on his account on social networks several hours after an Israeli strike killed him and journalists Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa in a media tent near the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City.
Anas Al-Sharif was one of the heroes of Gaza. He was – without a doubt – the journalist closest to all our hearts.
People here in Gaza often hate the media. They see exaggerated journalists and depict us as superhumans, capable of resisting implacable bombing, deprivation of food and water and the loss of dear beings; Or we demonize like “terrorists”, justifying the murder of our families and the destruction of our homes.
Anas was different; He did not distort the truth. He was one of us: raised in our refugee camps, suffering with us under bombs and in the middle of famine, crying for loved ones, refusing to leave his community. He stayed in Gaza, closed like an olive, a living example of a real Palestinian.
Anas began to report Tel Aviv Tribune at the start of the genocide, but he quickly became a familiar face. He and Ismail al-Ghoul have not stopped broadcasting from north of Gaza even when they have faced constant threats. Their warm friendship, and the funny and sad moments they shared, made us feel closer to them.
After the martyrdom of Ismail last year – that God has mercy on him – we felt that we had lost a dear brother and that we only left.
Last month, when Anas broke down on the camera during the famine declaration, people said to him: “Continue, Anas, don’t stop, you are our voice.”
And indeed, he was our voice. We have often imagined that when the end of the genocide arrives, we will hear it announced by the voice of Anas Al-Sharif. There was no journalist in the more deserving world to declare this moment than Anas.
For me, Anas was more than a simple journalist. It was an inspiration. He was the reason why I picked up my pen whenever I lost the hope that everything would change because of what I write. I saw anas tirelessly report – hungry or full, in summer or winter, threatened with death or surrounded by cameras.
His perseverance convinced me that I was wrong to believe that documenting the genocide did not move anyone outside. Anas made me believe that our story can reach where we cannot, cross the seas and the oceans to all parts of the world. And his resilience, working every day, every hour, forced me to hope … Hopefully if we continue to speak, someone could listen.
Anas is now gone, and I feel that I was wrong to hope, badly to believe in the justice of this world, to look at him to appeal – with eyes overflowing with tears – to a global conscience which has proven to be weak and selective.
They did not deserve your tears, Anas! They did not deserve your self -sacrifice so that they know our history. They don’t hear because they refuse.
You have raised your voice, Anas, but you called those without conscience.
I wanted the war to be finished before being martyred so that I could go to find you in Gaza and tell you that our voices had succeeded, they had reached the outside world and motivated the change. I would have told you that you were my model and that your work made me move forward. And if at that moment you had smiled and called me your colleague, I would have cried with joy.
Your cover has ended, Anas, but the genocidal war did not. Today, we look helplessly the vile occupation boasting to target you before the whole world – the same world that you have begged until your last breath. Countries around the world remain silent; For them, economic agreements and political interests are more than human lives.
However, the occupation will not silence us, Anas. He wants us to die for speechless because our voice, while we groan pain and mourn the loss, disturb him, interferes with his genocidal reader.
Gaza will not give birth to another like you, Anas, nor someone like the writer and poet Refaat Alareer, nor as the director of the Marwan Al-Sultan hospital. The occupation targets the best and most brilliant, those who have raised their voice and showed the world what the Palestinians of dignity and integrity can do.
But we will not remain silent after these violent murders. Even if we know that the world will not listen to, we will continue to speak – because it is our fate and our duty. We, the living Palestinians who survived this genocide, must carry the inheritance of our martyrs.
For me, it means to speak, write and expose the crimes of this bloody and brutal occupation … Until the day you dreamed, Anas – the day when this genocide, the most horrible in modern history, ends. The day you return to your ancestral house in Al-Majdal and I go back to my village, Yibna.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.