An Israeli airstrike killed them in the early hours of this Thursday, while they were working in front of the Al Awda hospital, near the Nuseirat refugee camp. At the time of the bombing, the informants were inside a white van identified with the word “press” written in red, as seen in the images broadcast from Gaza by the Palestinian channel after the attack. In total, the Israeli bombings tonight in that area of the Strip have killed around twenty people, including the five journalists, and injured around thirty, according to the health authorities of the occupied Palestinian territory.
Israel has acknowledged responsibility for what it described as a “selective attack” against what it called “a squad of the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization.” Israeli authorities consider the Al Quds channel, founded in 2008, one of the media arms of Hamas.
The journalists killed in the bombing have been identified by their media outlet as Fadi Hassouna, Ibrahim Al Sheikh Ali, Mohammed Al Ladah, Faisal Abu Al Qumsan and Ayman Al Jadi. The latter, whose wife was admitted to the center to give birth, had gone to the hospital precisely to await the birth of his first child, as reported by Palestinian sources and the Qatari network Al Jazeera.
Five media workers lost their lives in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a bus for the press in front of Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip, they are:
Say Hassouna
Ibrahim Al-Sheikh Ali
Mohammed Al-Ladah
Faisal Abu Al-Qumsan
Ayman Al- Jadi— Quds News Network (@QudsNen)
After learning of the death of the five journalists, a statement from the media office of the Gaza Government has urged the International Federation of Journalists, the Union of Arab Journalists and “all journalistic organizations in the world” to denounce what has described as “systematic crimes against Palestinian journalists and media workers in Gaza.” The text “demands” the international community and those organizations to “protect journalists and media workers in Palestine, especially in Gaza”, “stop the genocide” and prosecute its perpetrators “before international courts.”
Since the start of the Israeli offensive in the Palestinian enclave hours after October 7, 2023, when Hamas and other armed groups killed about 1,200 people and kidnapped about 250, Israel has refused to allow international journalists access to the Strip in which, since that day, at least 45,399 Palestinians – mostly women and children – have died in attacks by its army, according to the latest data. of the health authorities of the Strip. Only a few Western journalists have been able to enter the enclave since then, but always integrated into Israeli military units, with the consequent censorship of information.
That veto has left Palestinian journalists as the only professional witnesses to what is happening in Gaza, a task for which these reporters have paid a high price. With the five deaths this Thursday, the Israeli attacks in Gaza have already killed 201 journalists since the Israeli offensive began, according to data from the enclave’s media office.
The NGO Committee to Protect Journalists, based in the United States, estimates, for its part, that the professionals killed in that period “in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and Lebanon” are at least 141, while it stated last 10 December that of the 104 journalists who have died this year while carrying out their work around the world, at least 55 perished in Palestine.
Another professional organization, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), defined in its 2023 report what is happening to media workers in Gaza. In October of that year, with the Israeli offensive having just begun, RSF filed a war crimes complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the murder of nine Palestinian journalists and one Israeli, in addition to the “deliberate” destruction of buildings. which housed more than 50 media outlets in Gaza. That was the third time since 2018 that RSF filed a complaint with the CFI for crimes committed against journalists in the Strip.
On December 22, 2023, for the murders of journalists, which it then counted at 66. RSF also asked the prosecutor of that international judicial body to investigate “all the murders of journalists committed by the Israeli army since December 7 October”.
International Humanitarian Law, what was once known as the laws of war, grants journalists working in armed conflict the same protection as any other civilian, as long as they do not participate in hostilities. Since the beginning of the bombings and the Israeli ground operation in Gaza, that country has accused various Gaza journalists of being members of various armed groups and even of having participated directly in the October 7 attacks, something of which it has never been accused. presented reliable evidence. In October, he accused six reporters from the Qatari channel Al Jazeera in the enclave of belonging to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
A Gazan journalist, Al Jazeera’s chief correspondent in the Strip, became in the first months of the war the symbol of the danger that entails for a Palestinian journalist to work in the Gaza war. A few days after the fighting broke out, an Israeli bombing killed his wife, two of his children, a grandson and other family members. Two months later, Dahdouh himself was wounded in an Israeli attack that killed his cameraman, Samer Abu Daqqa. In January, his eldest son, Hamza, also a journalist, died when his car was the target of another attack.
Another Al Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, had already become a symbol even before the Israeli offensive in Gaza began. Abu Akleh, who also had American nationality, was murdered. This journalist, very popular among Palestinians, was covering a military raid on the refugee camp in that town wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest identified as “press.”
