[TIMES OF ISRAEL]
The IDF on Saturday published a 2021 Hamas document obtained during its operations in the Gaza Strip that it says proves that Al Jazeera reporter Ismail al-Ghoul was a member of the terror group.
Al-Ghoul was killed in an IDF drone strike in Gaza City on Wednesday, alongside Al Jazeera cameraman Ramy El-Rify.
The IDF said that al-Ghoul participated in the October 7 attack on Israel as a member of the terror group’s elite Nukhba force, and was later involved in instructing terror operatives on how to film and distribute videos of attacks on Israeli troops.
The document, which the IDF says was obtained from Hamas computers seized in the Strip, included the details of thousands of operatives in the terror group’s military wing.
According to the document, from 2021, al-Ghoul was an engineer in Hamas’s Gaza City Brigade, the IDF says.
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Al Jazeera has denied Israel’s assertion that al-Ghoul was a Hamas operative.
“Despite the false attempts by Hamas and Al Jazeera to present al-Ghoul as a journalist, al-Ghoul was an active terrorist in the Hamas terror organization,” the military said.
In a statement on Wednesday, Hamas condemned the killings as a “heinous crime” which it said was “aimed at terrorizing and silencing” Palestinian journalists as they reported “the ongoing genocide against our people in the Gaza Strip for nearly 10 months.”
Al Jazeera, which broadcasts in English and Arabic, has been the focus of months of criticism from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.
In early May, the government banned Al Jazeera in Israel, shuttering and raiding its offices, alleging it was actively harming national security. Last month, the Tel Aviv District Court extended the ban on the network.
In January, Israel said an Al Jazeera staff journalist and a freelancer killed in an airstrike in Gaza were terror operatives.
The following month, it accused another journalist with the channel, who was wounded in a separate strike, of being a deputy company commander with Hamas.
Al Jazeera has fiercely denied Israel’s allegations and accused it of systematically targeting Al Jazeera employees in the Gaza Strip.
Thousands of terrorists broke through the border fence from Gaza on October 7, rampaging through Israel’s southern towns and murdering some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, while carrying out other atrocities like mutilation and sexual abuse.
They also took 251 hostages, 111 of whom are believed to still be held captive in Gaza, including the bodies of 39 confirmed dead by the IDF.
