The Al Jazeera Media Network logo is seen on its headquarters building in Doha, Qatar, June 8, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Naseem Zeitoon

JNS.org – The Israel Defense Forces on Sunday released internal Hamas records which it said confirmed that Al Jazeera reporter Ismail al-Ghoul was in fact a senior terrorist operative who took part in the Oct. 7 massacre.

“Al Jazeera, it’s time to face reality. Al-Ghoul was a Hamas Nukhba terrorist,” IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani tweeted on Saturday.

“A 2021 Hamas document states that Ismail Al-Ghoul was an engineer in the Hamas Gaza Brigade. Al-Ghoul, who was eliminated on Wednesday, was a Nukhba terrorist who took part in the October 7 massacre while working as a journalist for Al Jazeera,” the army spokesperson added.

The records, which the IDF said were seized by troops operating in the Gaza Strip, included the details of thousands of Hamas terrorists.

The IDF published the evidence amid accusations by the Committee to Protect Journalists and the International Committee of the Red Cross that Jerusalem targeted Al-Ghoul in violation of international law.

Al-Ghoul and Al Jazeera cameraman Ramy El-Rify were killed in a July 31 airstrike as they were en route to film near a house belonging to slain Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in Tehran last week.

Al-Ghoul participated in the Oct. 7 attack and instructed other terrorists on how to record and distribute videos of their attacks, the IDF said.

The statement stressed that the activities of al-Ghoul, a member of Hamas’s elite Nukba Force that led the Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel, were a “vital part” of the Islamist movement’s terrorist actions.

“The IDF and Israel Security Agency will continue to operate to eliminate terrorists who participated in the October 7 massacre,” the army said.

Israeli ground forces entered the Gaza Strip on Oct. 27 following weeks of airstrikes in response to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led massacre, in which terrorists murdered some 1,200 people, wounded thousands more, and abducted more than 250 men, women and children to the enclave.