Motaz Azaiza Said His Family Had No Hamas Ties. Records Show Two Relatives Were Convicted Terrorists

A claim made by prominent Gazan photojournalist Motaz Azaiza about relatives killed early in the Gaza war is drawing renewed scrutiny after researchers identified two of the dead as brothers who had spent decades in Israeli prisons over a deadly 1986 grenade attack near Jerusalem’s Western Wall.

The finding matters partly because of what Azaiza actually said. In a November 2023 interview with The New Arab, after describing the deaths of members of his extended family, Azaiza said that none of his family had anything to do with Hamas. He also said that he personally was not connected to Hamas.

Taken literally, the statement about Hamas may have been accurate. The two men identified in subsequent research were not being described as Hamas operatives. But the statement left out a significant piece of context: two relatives killed in the same October 12, 2023 incident had previously been imprisoned for terrorism.

The disclosure comes at a particularly sensitive moment for Azaiza, following his own recent descriptions of how information was withheld or filtered by journalists in Gaza.

Two brothers killed at the Azaiza family home

Research published by HonestReporting on September 24, crediting media consultant Leslie Kajomovitz, identified two of those killed as brothers Tariq Daoud Mustafa Al-Halisi and Abdul Nasser Daoud Mustafa Al-Halisi.

The identification can be independently connected to Palestinian records.

A Gaza casualty database lists both men as having been killed on October 12, 2023 at an Azaiza family home in Deir al-Balah. It gives Abdul Nasser Al-Halisi's age as 64 and Tariq Al-Halisi's as 57.

The brothers had a much older history.

Palestinian Authority news agency WAFA's prisoner records list both men as East Jerusalem residents arrested in October 1986 and serving life sentences. A separate WAFA record confirms that both were released on October 18, 2011 as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange and transferred to Gaza.

The dates are important because they lead directly back to one of the deadliest attacks in Jerusalem during that period.

The 1986 Western Wall grenade attack

On October 15, 1986, grenades were thrown at Israeli soldiers and their relatives near the Western Wall following a Givati Brigade swearing-in ceremony.

Dov Porat, 46, the father of a soldier, was killed. Contemporary reports said 69 people were wounded.

Israeli research sources identify Nasser and Tariq Halisi as members of the cell responsible for the attack. The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs says the brothers, from Silwan in East Jerusalem, were arrested shortly afterward by the Shin Bet. The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center likewise identifies the brothers as participants in the grenade attack and states that they were sentenced to life imprisonment before being released in the Shalit deal.

The organizational affiliation is less straightforward than the attack itself. HonestReporting notes that Palestinian Islamic Jihad was among the organizations that claimed responsibility, while an Israeli diplomatic communication to the United Nations said the suspects had been recruited by Fatah and trained in Jordan.

What is not in dispute in the available prisoner records is that both brothers were serving life sentences dating from arrests immediately after the October 1986 attack and that both were among the prisoners released in 2011.

The distinction Azaiza did not make

This creates an important distinction.

Azaiza's 2023 claim concerned Hamas specifically. Evidence that two relatives had been imprisoned for an attack associated in different accounts with Fatah or Palestinian Islamic Jihad does not by itself prove that his statement about Hamas was false.

It does, however, change the context in which readers would reasonably understand the statement.

Someone reading that his dead relatives had nothing to do with Hamas could easily take the remark as an assurance that the family members killed in the strike had no involvement in terrorism or armed Palestinian organizations. The histories of the Al-Halisi brothers show that this broader inference would have been wrong.

There is also no publicly established evidence in the sources reviewed for this article showing why the Azaiza family home was struck on October 12, 2023. The presence of the Al-Halisi brothers should therefore not be presented as proof that they were the target of the strike or that their presence caused it. HonestReporting itself notes that the reason the house was destroyed remains unknown.

That caveat matters. So does the information Azaiza omitted.

A wider debate over what Azaiza chose not to show

The discovery has attracted additional attention because Azaiza has recently described other situations in which information was deliberately withheld.

In a lengthy September 3, 2026 interview on Ahmad Biqawi's Taqarrab podcast, Azaiza said he filmed Israeli hostages being beaten after they were brought into Gaza on October 7, 2023, but did not publish the footage.

According to his account, he feared that Israel could use the recordings to identify the Palestinians visible in the videos. Multiple reports reviewing the interview quoted Azaiza saying he did not want to be indirectly responsible for those people's deaths.

He also described an environment in which Palestinian journalists sometimes turned their cameras away when Gazans criticized Hamas.

In another section of the same interview, Azaiza discussed a journalists' group called SMART, which he described as belonging to Hamas and containing journalists across Gaza. HonestReporting later found earlier Palestinian reporting documenting the Smart Media Center in Rafah and its involvement in coordinating media activities, although the precise nature and extent of Hamas control over journalists remains a subject requiring further investigation.

Azaiza has pushed back against some of the coverage surrounding the interview. In a September 20 response, he said his comments had been distorted, poorly translated and taken out of context by Israel and its supporters.

Why the Al-Halisi discovery matters

The issue is therefore larger than whether Azaiza could technically say that his relatives had no connection to Hamas.

Journalism also depends on context.

When a source tells an international audience that relatives killed in a strike had no Hamas connections while leaving unmentioned that two of those relatives had served roughly 25 years of life sentences for a deadly terrorist attack, the omitted information materially changes the story readers are being asked to understand.

It becomes more significant when viewed alongside Azaiza's own recent descriptions of withholding footage, protecting the identities of people involved in abusing Israeli hostages and operating inside a media environment where politically damaging material could go unpublished.

None of those facts establishes why the Azaiza family home was struck in 2023. Nor do the convictions of two family members transfer responsibility to other people killed alongside them.

But they do demonstrate why claims emerging from a tightly controlled wartime information environment require more than repetition. Sometimes the most important part of a story is not a false sentence.

It is the fact that was left outside the frame.