Israeli Forces Kill Five Journalists in Intensified Gaza Assault
At least five journalists were killed in Gaza over the past 24 hours as Israeli forces intensified their bombings and air strikes across the besieged enclave.
The Gaza-Government Media Office announced on Saturday that three journalists succumbed to their injuries in different incidents of Israeli attacks in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza central area and two others in Gaza City. These latest fatalities have taken the overall death toll of media workers since the beginning of the present conflict on October 7, 2017, to at least 158.
Regarding the fatal suffering in Nuseirat, the targets were named Amjad Jahjouh and Rizq Abu Ashkian, working for Palestine Media Agency and Wafa Abu Dabaan, working for Islamic University Radio of Gaza. Jahjouh is reported to have been married to Abu Dabaan, and their children also lost their lives in the current incident. Al Jazeera writes that not less than ten people lost their lives in the Nuseirat bombing.
Two Palestinian journalists died on Friday, Saadi Madoukh and Ahmed Sukkar, as the Israelis launched an attack on the Madoukh family house in Daraj neighbourhood, Gaza City.
Even earlier, the never-ending conflict in Gaza had been considered the most dangerous for journalists and media employees globally. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said that 108 media workers were killed in the war, and it was the deadliest period for media since the organisation started recording such statistics in 1992.
Previous Casualties
Al Jazeera’s reporter Hamza Dahdouh, son of Wael Dahdouh, the director of Al Jazeera Gaza bureau, died due to an Israeli missile attack in the Khan Younis in the southern Gaza strip in January the same year. He was driving a car close to al-Mawasi, an area that Israel claimed was safe but targeted severely. Mustafa Thuraya, a journalist like Safiya Abdul Raheem Mohammed, was also among them killed in the same incident. Wael Dahdouh had been similarly injured, and cameraperson Samer Abudaqa was killed during a report in the southern Gaza Strip in December.
At least 23 members of Al-Aqsa network, a media channel affiliated with Hamas, have been reported to have been killed in Israeli attacks since October- The Guardian concludes.
Gaza’s Ministry of Health said on Saturday that 87 people lost their lives across the Gaza Strip over the past two days, including five journalists, increasing the death toll of the nine-month Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip to at least 38,098. Over 87,700 possible casualties have been reported in the same period about the injuries encountered during Israel’s military assault.
Hani Mahmoud of Al Jazeera described escalated air raids covering the central parts of Gaza, south of the Gaza Strip. He shifted to the northern Shujayea neighbourhood of Gaza City as well. Men and women in the eastern parts of Khan Younis and Rafah were burying the corpses that were retrieved from hospital morgues, a reality check that has impoverished itself to normativity.
An employee of the UNRWA was killed, and several other employees were injured when the Israeli forces targeted UNRWA’s warehouses in central Gaza, particularly in the Maghazi camp. Videos confirming this were provided by Al Jazeera’s fact-checking arm, Sanad, of the same facility, as well as of the arrival of bodies and injured persons at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah. Namely, one of the attackers was wearing a jacket indicating that he was a worker of the UNRWA.
On the same day, the Palestinian Information Center claimed that at least six policemen were killed in the Israeli bombardment of their vehicle located in the Saudi neighbourhood of western Rafah. One more man died in an Israeli air strike on a police car in the Gaza Strip’s district called al-Shakoush, northwest of Rafah.
The violence goes on, and the situation in Gaza worsens as a result of the increase in actions, the number of victims and the destruction of the infrastructure, mainly affecting journalists and media staff who endanger their lives to report on the matter.
