This analysis has been accepted by the International Criminal Court as part of a submission of evidence of war crimes in Gaza
by Horatio Clare
Joseph Morton, the only American reporter known to have been murdered by the Nazis, works on local papers in the Midwest until he joins the Associated Press in 1937.
Anas al-Sharif, one of over 200 journalists murdered by the Netanyahu regime, is born in Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza, in 1996. He studies media and journalism at Al-Aqsa university and volunteers with media organisations, gaining work experience in the news business.
Anna Mazepa, murdered by killers loyal to Vladimir Putin in 2006, is born in New York in 1958, daughter of two Ukrainian Soviet diplomats to the United Nations.
She marries Alexander Politkovski in 1978, becoming Anna Politkovskaya. She graduates from Moscow State University’s school of journalism in 1980.
Joe, Anas and Anna have much in common. They are extraordinarily brave. Their work is stunningly accomplished and historically invaluable, bringing all three international acclaim.
All three are coldly and thoughtfully murdered by parallel chains of politicians and soldiers. The point of this analysis is to discover just how parallel and similar these chains of homicidal responsibility are.
The question is simple: can you swap the names and uniforms between these chains? Is the moral and legal culpability of their killers the same?
Anas and Joseph start young. Anas al-Sharif has been telling people he wants to be a journalist since he was a boy. There are pictures of him aged 12 studying the press at work, foreign reporters in flak jackets covering the war which comes to Anas’ home, Gaza, in 2008.
Joseph Morton, meanwhile, leaves his Midwest homeland behind, noting and typing and reporting his way across a continent and an ocean to cover his war. In 1940, after success in a series of regional AP offices, Joseph makes it to the New York bureau of the Associated Press. He edits news features for two years.
‘News features’ are what journalists call history’s first and only true draft as it is inflicted on its victims, in front of reporters’ horrified eyes, in the battlefields and death camps of Europe and the killing zones of Chechnya and Gaza.
A journalism graduate now, Anna briefly joins Izvestiya, the Soviet Union’s official newspaper, in 1982. She works as an intern in the post room.
‘Sasha’s work,’ she says of her husband, later, ‘kept me from doing my own thing. Sasha is becoming one of the USSR’s most well-known TV journalists. The couple have two young children. Anna is a mother and housewife. To make her own money, Anna works shifts as a cleaner in the Mayakovsky theatre.
In 1942, Joseph’s editors send him to cover Hitler’s war. Joseph goes for it like a cub hurricane. Think Tintin embedded within the secret service. Contacts in the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services (now the CIA) take Joseph on their missions.
Anas’s last war arrives on October 7th 2023 and he scoops the world. While his friends, competitors and peers in the BBC, CNN, SKY, Reuters, Bloomberg and everywhere else are being shut out of Gaza, Al Jazeera’s team, a full set of producers, cameraman and their star reporter, are in.
In the Soviet Union, Anna Politkovskaya starts work on a transport magazine. Anna starts with a plane crash in Omsk in 1984. The job comes with unlimited travel in the USSR. She starts meeting the peoples and seeing the places which comprise the Soviet Union.
By 1991, with the collapse of the USSR, which she chronicles in print, the death threats to Anna and her family have begun.
Anna sends her teenage son to London for safety. Two years later Russia is in crisis, her husband’s career is waning and Anna is a columnist for Megalopolis-Express, in the years before it turns into a propaganda rag.
Social problems, refugees, post-Soviet corruption, larceny and theft by officials and spies and former spies, the churn of robbers, liars and killers who will become ‘Putin’s guard-dogs,’ as she puts it, are among her subjects.
And now Anna’s war arrives. When the Chechen war begins, Anna is a famous and award-winning writer, with deep and wide contacts across society.
All three of our reporters turn in history-scale scoops. With a senior contact in the OSS, Joseph flies into Bucharest to watch the Soviet Union’s Red Army liberate Romania from Nazi Germany.
Joseph regularly hitches lifts on Flying Fortresses — he reports a USAF raid on Rome by watching those tumbling, bursting, billowing American bombs, aimed at Nazis and Fascists, pouring out of the plane he is flying in. Joe takes notes as the bombs slaughter and bury Romans, civilians, towns and targets.
Anas watches and films from the ground and ditches as the IDF and IAF, working around the clock, systematically and unrelentingly apply the explosive savagery of the latest shells, missiles and bombs from the US, Europe and Britain to Gaza, to all its towns and cities, including his own.
From the rubble Anas reports the fighters of Hamas firing, killing and dying with abandon, and he films civilians, including his neighbours, friends and family, dying with much more abandon.
In Chechnya, Anna documents the slaughters and abuses of civilians committed by Russian forces, and the rise of Putin’s sickest dogs, Akhmad Kadyrov and his son Ramzan, puppet leaders of Chechnya, two of the more nauseating murderers of the late 20th century.
One of Anna’s famous scoops is the rescue of a group of ethnically mixed old people from a home which is being shelled by Russia. She not only breaks the story: with support from Novaya Gazeta, her paper, and its readers, she gets the victims out.
The titles of Anna’s books and collections of journalism tell the story of Putin’s Russia, of which she is now the leading investigator and describer: A Dirty War, A Small Corner of Hell, Life in a Failing Democracy.
Anna’s work gathers a global audience. The Kremlin tries to kill her at least nine times. She is beaten by the FSB and Kadyrov’s men and their creatures. She is threatened with rape and forced to watch as they go through pictures of her kids and talk about what they will do them.
One night Anna is marched out into the Chechen darkness by a senior Russian officer and told she is being executed. ‘After we walked for a while, he said, ‘Ready or not, here I come,’ she reports.
‘Something burst with pulsating fire around me, screeching, roaring, and growling. The lieutenant colonel was very happy when I crouched in fright. It turned out that he had led me right under the Grad rocket launcher at the moment it was fired.’
Undeterred, Anna keeps working, keeps writing, keeps publishing.
From Gaza, we see Anas’ work on our phones by running a thumb over them before breakfast. In Joseph’s day, it is ticker tape chattering out in every newspaper and radio station in the world which breaks the story — AP — ROMANIA LIBERATED — FROM JOSEPH MORTON IN BUCHAREST -.
As news organisations struggle to cover Gaza they are attacked by all sides. Massive Israeli, Palestinian and global efforts are made to distort and shape their coverage. Around the world, trust in the news and the media totters and veers as a million arguments and worse, based on what the media say and show and fail to say and show, rage around the planet.
At times Al Jazeera and the BBC effectively become the foreign broadcasters of record in Gaza: volumes of footage, recordings and reports come from stringers, citizens, Gaza-based reporters and freelances, but the BBC’s Rushdi Abualouf and Al Jazeera teams like Anas’s are on the ground, fully equipped, trained, accredited and trusted professionals from respected news organisations based abroad, in Qatar and Britain.
In November 2023, after twenty years of his reporting from Gaza and the West Bank, the BBC withdraws Rushdi Abualouf. Anas never leaves.
If covering an IDF / IAF war on Hamas from the field of fire is terrorising, then reporting Nazi efforts to hold Slovakia are just as bad.
From below, now, Joe watches Stuka dive-bombers of the Luftwaffe systematically howl down to attack Banska Bystrica, the city where he has landed with an OSS team who have brought Flying Fortress-loads of guns, ammunition, medical supplies, fuel and know-how to Slovak partisans.
Nazi forces encircle Banska Bystrica. Stukas strafe and bomb fleeing columns of refugees, civilians and fighters, the OSS, the partisans and Joe among them. Hunted by troops with dogs, they eventually go into hiding in a mountain hut.
As bombs fall around him around the clock, Anas is aware he is watched and monitored every minute. Everything he does is noted by the Israeli Heron and Hermes 900 drones, and the American and British Predators scouring Gaza, recording everything above ground.
The latest generation of Israeli quadcopter drones, armed with bombs and machine-guns, stalk the Anas and his subjects, the people of Gaza. As it happens, the APUS 25, the very latest thing for watching and killing people on the ground, is powered by engines supplied by a British company, RCV Engines, based in Dorset, exported to the skies of Gaza on UK government licenses.
Israeli spying tech, the best the world has ever known, fills reporters’ phones and laptops, combing the digital and radio spectra. The Israeli military tracks, records and analyses Anas’ every move and word.
American Hellfire and Israeli Spike missiles are only ever a keystroke away and Anas sees and hears them strike all the time. Two hundred of his colleagues, peers and competitors are killed around him. He works harder than ever, in his PRESS flak jacket and his blue helmet.
It is bullets which come for Joe Morton and the men with him. Betrayed by a villager on the day after Christmas 1944, their hut is fired on from all sides by Nazi forces comprised of German, Slovakian and Ukrainian fighters. The survivors surrender. Our man identifies himself as Joseph Morton, non-combatant, internationally recognised reporter for the Associated Press.
Photographs of Joe show a young and beautiful face, pale and dark-browed, dominated by two wide and curious eyes, but he looks haggard now.
During his six weeks on the run through a winter which freezes your leather boots to your skin, Joe has seen over eighty people around him, hunted partisans short of food and shelter, die of cold.
Now he puts up his hands, and along with nine OSS men and four men of the British special forces, Joe begins his journey to Mathausen Concentration Camp.
In Beslan, North Ossetia, in 2004, gunmen take 1000 children and their teachers hostage in a school. Anna boards an Aeroflot flight, intending to help negotiate their release. A flight attendant serves her a cup of tea with FSB poison in it.
Anna loses consciousness but she does not die. She recovers and returns to work. She is writing a major story on the kinds of tortures used by Putin’s puppets in Chechnya.
The legal positions of Anna, Joe and Anas at this point are similar. Direct orders from the Hitler regime require the Nazi forces to quickly execute all the special forces soldiers and OSS agents, in contravention of the Geneva conventions. Joe is a reporter, protected by those conventions.
Direct orders from the Netanyahu regime require the IAF and IDF to kill without warning or hesitation anyone they or the regime deem enemy combatants. Anas is a reporter, protected by the Geneva conventions.
Anna is a private citizen of the Russian Federation, protected by the laws of that state, and by the Geneva Conventions which apply to non-combatants. But the law in Russia and Chechnya is whatever Putin and Kadyrov say it is and now Kadyrov clarifies the position Anna, to her face: ‘You’re an enemy…to be shot.’
So much for the legal stuff. Their actual positions are perilously similar, too. Anas has been told he is on Israel’s kill list, branded an enemy combatant by the Netanyahu regime.
Anas has been begged to be careful. Anas says he will never stop reporting, even as the Netanyahu regime distributes slanders and apparently faked evidence to ‘prove’ him killable.
In October 2024 an Israeli drone fires on Anas and his team while they are reporting from Jabalia, in their press vests. One is severely injured. The IDF accuse Anas and the team of being Palestinian militants. Because they are journalists, and the bravest of the brave, they keep reporting. Anas is now the most prominent, well-known, recognised and respected journalist in Gaza. Anas is the eyes and ears of the world in Gaza. Anas is the face journalism in Gaza, watched and listened by an audiences of tens of millions around the world.
Now Anas and his team set up in a clearly marked and known PRESS tent next to Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza City. Today is August 10th 2025.
Anna is at home in her apartment block in Moscow, working on her torture story. Today is October 7th 2006. It is Vladimir Putin’s birthday.
Joe is taken down into Mathausen’s camp jail. The basement houses execution rooms, including a gas chamber and a crematorium.
On the last day of their lives, Anas sets about his reporting, Anna gets up and leaves her apartment to go to work, while Joe, still banged up, insists to his captors that he is a reporter, not a combatant.
Joe has been doing this for three weeks now, three weeks in this basement where, in the last months of the war, up to 500 Nazi victims will be gassed and burned every day.
Anas has been insisting the same thing to the world: he is a journalist, no more, no less. He has been telling this to all his watchers for months, especially since he was publicly threatened in July 2024 — a year ago last month — by Israel’s military forces.
Anas was lying about an IAF strike on the Al-Tabaeen school in 2024, the Israel Defence Force claim, of an attack in which 100 civilians die.
According to the IDF, Anas’ reporting is protecting Hamas fighters. IDF spokesmen accuse him of being a Palestinian militant. The IDF presents no credible evidence for this lethal slur.
The awful thing about what happens now is that Joe, Anna and Anas must all know it is coming. Anna has survived multiple assassination attempts. Joe must struggle to imagine being released unharmed from the the death cells.
Anas tells the Committee to Protect Journalists: ‘I live with the feeling I could be bombed and martyred at any moment.’ The CPJ tells the world that the relentless slurs and attacks on Anas by the Netanyahu regime, spread by the IDF, are ‘a precursor to assassination.’
Today, January 12 1945, Joe, and all the OSS men, and the British special forces soldiers, are told they are going to be photographed.
A telegram has come from Berlin signed by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of Reich police, sealing their fate.
We know what happened next thanks to fellow Associated Pressman and then historian Larry Heinzerling, who interviewed an eyewitness, a Polish prisoner, William Ornstein, who had been put to work in what turned out to be the execution room.
William Ornstein watches through a peephole built into the door as all fourteen men are brought in, one by one, and told to face the camera.
Anas Al-Sharif last faces his own camera on the morning of August 10th 2025. He broadcasts from the bedside of a starving child, a boy, his arms sickeningly thin, visibly malnourished, clearly in desperate need of food and medical care, his breathing fast and shallow, his eyes holding a kind of dissociated blankness, his head moving listlessly.
Anas’ cameraman pans to another child whose arms are even thinner. And then we see a nursing infant, unconscious, so thin it barely looks human. History’s cameras have seen children like this before. You have seen children dying like this before, in Darfur, in Ethiopia in the 1980s, in Auschwitz in the 1940s.
The hospital is short of food, medicine, milk, baby formula, Anas reports. He does not editorialise. He does not judge or extrapolate. Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin of the BBC, Christiane Amanpour of CNN, Christina Lamb of the Sunday Times, like any great, (or decent or even half-decent reporter) would make the same report in the same way.
Anas’ eyes are wide but he is steady. With those children starving to their deaths around him, you cannot imagine how Anas has the strength to face the camera so calmly, so professionally. You would have wept and raged. But Anas is one of the very best of us. And he is used to this.
William Ornstein watches, in the execution cell in the basement of Mathausen concentration camp’s prison, as each man, having faced the camera, is told to turn his back to it, and face the wall. William Ornstein watches as a Nazi soldier steps forward and shoots each in the back of the neck.
Now Joseph Morton is brought in and told to face the camera. William Ornstein has removed the body of the man who has just been murdered, and he has mopped the floor. It must still be damp under Joseph’s feet. The smoke of the pistol cartridges and the smell of the blood and flesh cannot have faded much.
In Gaza City, by the Al-Shifa hospital, Anas and his team are watched from above by the drone pilot. They have been painstakingly tracked and comprehensively monitored by drones flying below 1000 feet, under the command of ‘Lieutenant Colonel A’, head of Unit 9900, the ROKKAK drone squadron, which specialises in intelligence gathering.
Unit 9900 provides everything the pilot of the killer drone needs to know about Anas’ whereabouts and activities.
The pilot who will murder him is either an officer in 210 Squadron, flying Eitan drones from Tel Nof airbase, or he or she is from 166 Squadron, flying a Hermes 900 drone out of Palmachim airbase, or an officer in 161 Squadron, also based at Palmachim, flying and Elbit Hermes 450 drones, or he or she is an officer with the 144th UAV Squadron based at Hatzor Air Force Base, where they fly a range of UAVs, including the new ‘Spark’ fifth generation drone.
In due course, prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in the Hague will determine who this pilot is, which drone they used and where it flew from, unless the Netanyahu regime falls and Israeli justice catches up with these people first.
As he moves in and out of the PRESS-marked tent, Anas is studied through state-of-the art optics. Knowing precisely where the target it, the drone operators line up Anas in the PRESS tent with a dot in a circle in a box, just like our kids do on Battlefield for X-box. The pilot reports readiness to fire.
In Moscow, Anna returns to her flat with groceries in her shopping bag. She lets herself into her building and walks to the lift. She presses the call button. The lift arrives. Anna steps inside.
Legally, Adolf Hitler, der Fuhrer, Reichs Chancellor of Germany, gives the order which the killer in the basement obeys as he raises his pistol and aligns its sights with the back of Joe Morton’s neck. The two moments link on paper.
Legally and certainly vocally, but perhaps not on paper, Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, instructs his liaison with the Israeli Air Force to tell their pilot and gunner to fire on Anas and his colleagues in their press tent.
Legally and definitely vocally, for he avoids computers, Vladimir Putin, almost certainly through his attack dog, Ramazan Kadyrov, passes the sentence of death by murder on Anna Politkovskaya.
Joseph is facing the wall, his back to the camera. In the lift in Moscow, Anna turns to find herself facing a man with a raised pistol, the black hole of its barrel pointing at her. Anas is in his press tent as the Israeli Air Force officer’s finger pulls the trigger.
Joseph Morton’s life now extends to milliseconds, Anas al-Sharif’s life to seconds, and Anna Politkovskaya’s life to split seconds.
The numbers of journalists murdered in Gaza make this journalism’s own little holocaust. More have been killed by the Netanyahu regime than died in the last hundred years of war reporting.
Plenty of fake news has come out of Israel and Gaza. It has not come from journalists and it has not prevented this generation’s reporters producing accurate news, features and multimedia reporting to stand with the profession’s greatest.
Despite Israel’s best and worst efforts, journalists have powerfully informed the world of the horrors inflicted on Gaza. I do not know what it is like to do this work but I know men and women who do.
In the garden of the Green Room at the Hay Festival in June, where a group of them have gathered to honour Don Phillips, of the Guardian, murdered in the Brazilian Amazon because of his reporting, I shake hands with Wyre Davies. He is just back from the Gaza border with Israel.
We have met before, some years ago, on a local story involving the demonstrative killing of some sheep by thugs — my mother’s flock, as it happens.
‘How is it Wyre?’ I say.
Wyre Davies has changed since 2017. He looks like a lion in winter now, this dark and tanned Welshman who has been to all the wars for the BBC. He smiles at me, to soften it, I think, and he winces.
‘Lot of dead children on this one, H. Lot of dead kids.’
Journalists have no Victoria Crosses. We have no Silver Stars. We have Pulitzers and we have indictments.
Anas and his Al-Jazeera team won the Pulitzer prize last year for their coverage of the war on Gaza.
History sees Anas ripping off his PRESS flak jacket and helmet as he broke the news of the ceasefire, which would be demolished by the men who would kill him, to cheering crowds.
History will always show him doing so — so young, so brilliant, so brave and so hopeful.
Like the new of Anas’ murder, Joseph Morton’s death brings an outpouring of grief, love and esteem from his colleagues around the world, and, like Anas, from his widowed and now fatherless children.
Joe’s reporting ‘comprised one of the most brilliant chapters of the entire news coverage of the conflict,’ wrote Kent Cooper, General Manager of the Associated Press, to Joseph’s widow, Letty Morton.
‘Joe was absolutely fearless, and evidently nothing that I or anyone else could say would deter him on grounds of personal safety when he was on the trail of a great news story.’
The murder of Anna Politkovskaya causes grief, pain, disgust and fury around the globe. It is condemned by many world leaders.
History knows Putin for a mass-murderer. We watch his indictment’s evidence building every night and morning on our phones and TVs.
History, partly thanks to journalism, hands Hitler his indictment for the mass murder of civilians, homosexuals, socialists, communists, dissidents and the genocide of Jews.
Can Benjamin Netanyahu avoid the very same word-for-word verdict for the mass murder of civilians, aid workers, medics and journalists, and the genocide of Palestinians? Did Benjamin Netanyahu not order the killing of Anas al-Sharif? Did the order originate from someone else? Is Benjamin Netanyahu innocent of this crime?
In the end, the murders of these three reporters demands we answer one question.
That question, for history, for the International Court of Justice at the Hague, for the people of Israel and for all of us whose governments continue to support and supply weapons to the Israel of the Netanyahu regime, is this:
In the murders of Joseph Morton, Anna Politkovskaya and Anas Al-Sharif, are the legal and moral positions of Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu not the same?
NOTE: I am indebted to Newshawks in Berlin: the Associated Press and NAZI Germany by Larry Heinzerling, Randy Herschaft and Ann Cooper for Joseph’s story.
