Israel Has a Secret Military Unit That Smears Palestinian Journalists

Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif was killed by an Israeli airstrike on 10 August. Al-Sharif, 28, a prominent journalist who covered Israel’s genocide extensively from inside Gaza, was in a tent marked ‘PRESS’ outside the entrance of the al-Shifa hospital. Also killed in the strike were five other media workers: Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh and photographers Ibrahim Thaher and Mohamed Nofal, freelance photojournalist Mohammed al-Khalidi and cameraman Momen Aliwa.

Over the past 22 months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, at least 270 Palestinian journalists have been killed.

The attack on al-Sharif wasn’t unexpected. Israel had made no secret that it wanted him dead. The IDF first accused al-Sharif of leading a Hamas cell back in October 2023. It released a ‘kill list’ graphic with the names and pictures of six Al Jazeera journalists – Alaa Salameh, Hossam Shabat, Ashraf al-Sarraj, Ismail Abu Omar, Talal al-Arrouqi and al-Sharif – claiming they were Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives. 

Barely two weeks earlier, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CJP) had released a call to protect al-Sharif, warning that the “danger to his life is now acute”. Al-Sharif was repeatedly targeted on social media by IDF Arabic language spokesperson Avichay Adraee, who continued to smear al-Sharif after his death, saying he was a “Hamas operative working under the guise of a journalist”.  

Al-Sharif expected to die. His final words, posthumously published on social media, read: “If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice. I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification.”

Four days after his death, a joint Israeli-Palestinian investigation revealed that a secret IDF military unit is tasked with smearing Palestinian journalists as Hamas operatives to dampen global outrage over Israel’s ongoing and relentless murder of media workers. 

Three intelligence sources confirmed the existence of the so-called legitimisation cell to the Israeli-Palestinian +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call. The unit was set up after 7 October 2023 – not for military purposes, but PR ones. Though embedded in the IDF, the purpose of the legitimisation cell is to gather intelligence, not to directly support its operations in Gaza, but to bolster the country’s image on the international stage – an exercise known as hasbara in Hebrew. Its activities include finding information about schools and hospitals being used by Hamas, and linking Palestinian journalists to Hamas’s military wing. 

Israeli intelligence sources told +972 Magazine that the project was driven by a sense of rage that Palestinian journalists were “smearing [Israel’s] name in front of the world”. They described a recurring pattern in the legitimisation cell’s work – if Israel was criticised more on the global stage about a particular issue, the unit was told to find intelligence that could be declassified and used to publicly counter the critical narrative. 

“If the global media is talking about Israel killing innocent journalists,” one source told +972, “then immediately there’s a push to find one journalist who might not be so innocent – as if that somehow makes killing the other 20 acceptable.”

This is precisely what happened in the killing of al-Sharif. Shortly after targeting him, Israel reiterated in a statement that the journalist was “the head of a terrorist cell in the Hamas terrorist organisation and was responsible for advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF troops”. Yet according to documents released by the IDF – which have not been independently verified – al-Sharif was recruited to Hamas in 2013 and was active until 2017. From Israel’s own intelligence, al-Sharif played no part in the current war.

The IDF has provided no justification for the killing of al-Sharif’s five colleagues in the same strike.

There are stark similarities between al-Sharif’s killing and that of Al Jazeera correspondent Ismail al-Ghoul, 27, killed by an Israeli airstrike on the al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City in July 2024 along with his camera operator, Rami al-Rifi. After his death, the IDF claimed al-Ghoul was a “military wing operative and Nukhba [special forces unit of the al-Qassam Brigades] terrorist”. The IDF cited a 2021 document that stated al-Ghoul supposedly received his military rank in 2007. Al-Ghoul would’ve been just 10 years old at the time – seven years before he was allegedly recruited to Hamas’s military wing.

+927 Magazine reports that Israel’s political leaders directed the legitimisation cell’s areas of focus, and information gathered was regularly given to US sources via direct channels. Intelligence officers told the magazine they were told their work was necessary to allow Israel to prolong its war. 

The legitimisation cell doesn’t just smear journalists – it also works to justify attacks on civilian targets such as schools and hospitals, considered war crimes under international law. 

One source told +972: “The team regularly collected intelligence that could be used for hasbara [Israeli state propaganda] – say, a stockpile of [Hamas] weapons [found] in a school – anything that could bolster Israel’s international legitimacy to keep fighting. The idea was to [allow the military to] operate without pressure, so countries like America wouldn’t stop supplying weapons.”

+972 reports that the legitimation cell’s efforts regarding the deadly explosion at the al-Ahli Arab hospital on 17 October 2023 were hailed within the IDF as an early victory. The cell’s work allowed Israeli officials to counter reports by Gaza’s Ministry of Health that an Israeli strike was to blame, by claiming that the blast was caused by a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket instead.

Just a day after the explosion, the IDF released a recording of what it claimed was a phone call between two Hamas operatives blaming the al-Ahli bombing on Islamic Jihad (Israeli military’s surveillance unit –  Unit 8200 – has been capturing and storing recordings of millions of phone calls made by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank since 2021, using Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform). 

A February 2024 investigation by Forensic Architecture debunked the IDF’s claims about the explosion at al-Ahli Arab hospital, and in December 2023, a Palestinian human rights activist told +972 and Local Call that it was his own voice on the phone call recording, having a benign conversation with a friend. 

The three intelligence sources said they were allowed to declassify such information for public release. “There was this phrase, ‘That’s good for legitimacy,’” one source told +972. “The goal was simply to find as much material as possible to serve hasbara efforts.”

Two intelligence sources also told +972 that since October 2023, the cell misrepresented intelligence in at least one case so that an unnamed journalist could be falsely portrayed as a Hamas militant. “They were eager to label him as a target, as a terrorist – to say it’s okay to attack him,” a source explained. “They said: during the day he’s a journalist, at night he’s a platoon commander. Everyone was excited. But there was a chain of errors and corner-cutting. In the end, they realised he really was a journalist.” He wasn’t targeted.

Despite increasing scrutiny of its targeting of journalists, Israel has continued to do so with abandon. On 25 August, Israel bombed the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in a “double tap” attack – the first airstrike was followed by a second after emergency workers and press rushed to the scene. The attack killed at least 20 people, including medics, patients and five journalists: Reuters cameraman Hussan al-Masri, Associated Press journalist Mariam Dagga, Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye journalist Mohammed Salama, photographer Moas Abu Taha who had worked with Reuters, and Quds Network and Middle East Eye journalist Ahmad Abu Aziz.

The IDF confirmed its bombing of the hospital, saying in a statement that the IDF “regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and does not target journalists as such”. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the incident a “tragic mishap” that Israel “deeply regrets”. The IDF later appeared to row back on the PM’s apology, saying the two airstrikes were targeting a “Hamas camera”.

Gaza is currently the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist, and Israel has killed more media workers in Gaza since October 2023 than in both World Wars, the US Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in former Yugoslavia and the war in Afghanistan combined. 

The targeting of journalists can be viewed as part of Israel’s campaign of scholasticide – the systematic destruction of Palestinian education and targeting of cultural figures and infrastructure – which Israel has been accused of since the 1947 Nakba. The current genocide has accelerated this process, with nearly 90% of Gaza’s schools damaged or destroyed by Israel. 

Between October 2023 and February 2024, the Palestinian Ministry of Culture reported the loss of 45 artists, writers and cultural activists. Pen International launched a project in December 2024 to honour the lives of writers and poets killed in the first 11 months of the genocide, including Refaat Alareer, a writer, poet, professor and activist who was killed in an Israeli airstrike along with his brother, sister and four nephews. 

The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor released a statement after his death saying that Alareer and his family’s apartment was “surgically bombed out of the entire building where it’s located, according to corroborated eyewitness and family accounts” and this came “after weeks of death threats that Refaat received online and by phone from Israeli accounts”.

Israel’s targeting of Palestinian journalists, writers and other cultural figures can be seen as part of a historical continuum. Israel’s fourth prime minister Golda Meir, who ordered the assassination of Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani by Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.

Upon Kanafani’s death, Meir reportedly remarked: “Today, we have eliminated an intellectual brigade. Ghassan, with his pen, is more dangerous to Israel than a battalion of fedayeen [military guerrillas].”