Father of Al Jazeera journalist killed in Israeli air strike on Gaza

The father of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif has been killed in an Israeli air strike in northern Gaza.

Al-Sharif told Al Jazeera that his 65-year-old father, Jamal, was killed on Monday after his home in Jabalia refugee camp was struck.

“My beloved father has become a martyr. To God we belong and to Him we shall return,” al-Sharif wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Al-Sharif is the fourth Al Jazeera journalist to lose family members since Israel launched an assault on Gaza on October 7 in response to a Hamas attack on southern Israel.

Al-Sharif said the rest of his family had evacuated to an UNRWA school but that Jamal was not able to flee for health reasons.

Al-Sharif said that he would continue to work and cover the Israeli assault on Gaza.

“We buried my father’s body in the schools people are sheltering in here because we are unable to move or leave this area right now. I will continue to cover events that are unfolding.”

“But despite all of this, and despite the targeting of my home and the killing of my father, I will continue to cover from Jabalia refugee camp and from northern Gaza,” he added.

On October 25, Wael Dahdouh, an Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent in Gaza, lost his wife, son, daughter and grandson in an Israeli air strike on the Nuseirat refugee camp.

Mohamed Abu al-Qumsan, a broadcast engineer with Al Jazeera’s bureau in Gaza, lost 19 family members, including his father and two sisters, in Israeli air raids on the Jabalia refugee camp on October 31.

Moamen Al Sharafi, a correspondent for Al Jazeera Arabic, lost 22 members of his family in an Israeli air strike on the Jabalia refugee camp on December 6.

The family of Al Jazeera correspondent Youmna ElSayed received a threatening phone call in October from a person claiming to be from the Israeli army, warning them to immediately leave their home as Israel steps up its bombardment of the besieged enclave.

Reporting from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, Al Jazeera’s Zein Basravi said that for journalists covering the war from Gaza, “it has been very personal. It has been very difficult. It has been reporting done under the most difficult of circumstances”.

“And we have to understand those people living in Gaza, the reporters – ours and everybody else’s – they are from there. They live there,” he said.

More than 18,200 people have been killed in the Israeli assault on Gaza, according to Palestinian officials.

Around 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas attack on Israel, according to Israeli authorities.