‘Daring attack’: journalist Abdullah Aljamal killed by IDF praised Hamas massacre

A journalist and member of Hamas confirmed as one of the militants who held three Israeli men hostage had written articles praising the October 7 massacre.

Abdullah Aljamal was a journalist and a member of Hamas.

A journalist and member of Hamas confirmed as one of the militants who held three Israeli men hostage had written an article after the October 7 massacre, praising it as a “daring attack by Hamas fighters at Israeli targets.”

Another article defended the capture of Israeli soldiers by Hamas militants in the Jabaliya refugee camp, describing Palestinian “joy” at the operation, and attacking Israeli “aggression”.

Abdallah Aljamal, who has written for the Al Jazeera network and was a regular contributor to The Palestine Chronicle, was identified earlier this week by the Israeli military as one of the militants holding Almog Meir Jan, Andrei Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.

Mr Meir Jan, Mr Kozlov and Mr Ziv said their captors kept them in the dark and punished them for the slightest breach of Hamas’ strict rules.

The three men were freed at the weekend during a high risk daylight operation by the IDF in Nuseirat. Noa Argamani, 26, was freed in the same operation in a different area of the town.

Mr Aljamal’s links to Hamas have been strongly denied in Palestinian media, with The Palestine Chronicle insisting he lived in the same apartment block but a different apartment from the hostages.

However the captives themselves have identified him as one of their jailers, according to The Wall St Journal. “Abdullah and his father Ahmad Aljamal — a doctor and imam at a local mosque that is run by Hamas — were both killed during the operation. Their neighbours said they always knew that Abdullah Aljamal was affiliated with Hamas,” The Wall St Journal reports.

Amid concern over news that a member of Hamas could also work as a journalist, particularly for a global website, Al Jazeera denied in a statement that Mr Aljamal had ever worked for the network. However they did admit he had contributed to an article published in 2019.

In a post on X, the network said: “Abdullah Al-Jamal has never worked with the network, but had contributed to an op-ed in 2019”.

That article, co-written with Ramzy Baroud, founder and editor of The Palestine Chronicle, documented claims of torture from Palestinians who had been held in Israeli jails.

In Aljamal’s profile at the start of the article, Al Jazeera described him as a “Gaza-based reporter and photojournalist. He often reports from the ongoing ‘March of Return’ protests at the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel.”

A search of the Palestine Chronicle’s website shows Mr Aljamal‘s articles appearing only two or three times a year until two weeks after the October 7 massacre that resulted in Israel’s invasion of Gaza. However since October 23 2023, his articles appear every few days.

His first article after the massacre describes the attack as “a daring attack by Hamas fighters at Israeli targets,” going on to accuse Israel of waging war on the people of Gaza and asking: “Will Israel succeed in displacing Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip?”

In a second article published on the same day, he quotes “Israeli Affairs expert” Ayman Shama gloating over the massacre. “The images were impressive,” he quotes Shama as saying. “The Palestinian Resistance managed to infiltrate all settlements in the Gaza Envelope and take control of all military bases along the fence”.

Other articles describe the tragedy of individuals killed and maimed during the Israeli invasion of Gaza, but the tone changes in an article on the capture of Israeli soldiers by Hamas in the Jabaliya refugee camp.

“The capture of Israeli soldiers brought joy back to our hearts,” he quotes one young Palestinian as saying. He adds the young man “explains” that “resistance is the only option for the Palestinian people to confront the Israeli aggression and stop their continuous crimes against civilians which have been going on since 1948”. There is no attempt to question the young man’s claim of “continuous crimes” in the article.

The Palestine Chronicle, which describes itself as a “non profit organisation whose mission is … to highlight issues of relevance to human rights, national struggles, freedom and democracy,” confirmed Aljamal was a contributor.

“The Palestine Chronicle is saddened to learn that Abdallah Aljamal, one of its contributors in the Gaza Strip, has been killed in the latest Israeli massacre in the Nuseirat refugee camp,” the newspaper wrote.

The newspaper went on to deny any links between Mr Aljamal and the captives, repeating claims that Mr Aljamal lived on a different floor from the apartment where the Israelis were held.

“Abdallah Aljamal’s reports have focused entirely on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, especially in the central part of the Strip, starting shortly after the war,” it stated.

Mr Aljamal, his doctor wife and his father were killed by the Israeli Defence Forces when they stormed the apartment block where the captives were held, freeing all three.