(JNS) The Israel Defense Forces has claimed that a Palestinian journalist working for Al Jazeera is a Hamas commander, citing documents recovered by the military during operations in the Gaza Strip.
“In the morning, he’s a journalist on the Al Jazeera channel, and in the evening, a terrorist in Hamas!” Lt. Col. Avichay Adraee, the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesman, tweeted on Sunday.
According to Adraee, troops operating in northern Gaza several weeks ago found a laptop at a Hamas base that belonged to Mohamed Washah, who has appeared in Al Jazeera broadcasts since the Oct. 7 massacre.
Information on the laptop showed that Washah, 37, from central Gaza’s Bureij neighborhood, is a “prominent commander” in Hamas’s anti-tank missile unit. In late 2022, he began working on research and development in the terror group’s air force.
“Who knows how many details we will reveal about the presence of other terrorists in journalistic garb in the near future,” wrote Adraee.
A laptop that belonged to Muhammad Washah, an @AlJazeera journalist, was recovered by IDF in the northern Gaza Strip. It has pics proving he also serves as a senior Hamas military operative in the anti-tank missile array and in late 2022 he moved to work on R&D of aerial weapons… https://t.co/U2q1mqOWXz
— افيخاي ادرعي (@AvichayAdraee) February 11, 2024
Last month, the IDF presented evidence that two Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza in an Israeli airstrike were terrorist operatives and said that they were operating drones that put soldiers at risk.
During his Middle Eastern diplomatic tour, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, called the deaths of Hamza Wael Dahdouh, the son of Al Jazeera’s Gaza correspondent Wael al-Dahdouh, and Mustafa Thuria an “unimaginable tragedy.” The statement came after Al Jazeera reported that two of its employees were killed in the strike on a vehicle in the Rafah area. The Qatari state media accused the IDF of deliberately targeting freelance journalists.
However, a document that the IDF posted to social media alleges that Thuria was a Hamas operative. The document lists him as a deputy squad commander in a battalion of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the terror group’s “military wing.”
Other documents found by the IDF indicate that Dahdouh was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative whose specialty is electronic engineering and who previously served as a deputy commander of a platoon in the Zaytoun Battalion. Before his death, he was in charge of a section of PIJ’s rocket unit.
