Al Jazeera journalist outed as Hamas commander

“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.

Israel’s government on Monday morning moved to shutter the Al Jazeera offices in Israel. A draft bill to close the local bureau passed in a telephone vote.

The Qatari network is vehemently anti-Israel, and incites hatred and violence against the Jewish state in the Arab world, the Israeli government has long maintained.

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.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during his Middle Eastern diplomatic swing, called the deaths of Hamza Wael Dahdouh, the son of 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 Jerusalem of deliberately targeting the freelance journalists.

However, a document that the IDF posted to social media appears to prove 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 Dadough 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.

Additionally, Israel said that Dadough had carried out terrorist attacks against Israel.