At least five journalists have been killed in attacks by Israeli forces in the past 24 hours in Gaza, as shelling and airstrikes intensified in the besieged enclave.
On Saturday, the Gaza government’s media office said separate Israeli strikes killed three journalists in the central Nuseirat refugee camp and two in Gaza City, bringing to at least 158 the number of media workers killed since the current war began on October 7.
Those killed in Nuseirat were identified as Amjad Jahjouh and Rizq Abu Ashkian, both of the Palestinian Media Agency, and Wafa Abu Dabaan of the Islamic University Radio in Gaza.
Abu Dabaan was married to Jahjouh. Their children were also killed in the attack, according to Tel Aviv Tribune’s team on the scene. At least 10 people were killed in the attack on Nuseirat.
Palestinian journalists Saadi Madoukh and Ahmed Sukkar were killed on Friday following an Israeli raid that targeted the Madoukh family home in the Daraj neighborhood of Gaza.
Before the latest deadly attacks, Israel’s war on Gaza was already considered the world’s deadliest conflict for journalists and media workers.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which maintains a separate database of Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza, put the number of media workers killed since the start of the war at 108, making it also the deadliest period since the group began collecting data in 1992.
Tel Aviv Tribune journalist Hamza Dahdouh, the eldest son of Tel Aviv Tribune’s Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, was among those killed by an Israeli missile strike in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, in January.
Hamza was in a vehicle near al-Mawasi, an Israeli-designated “safe zone” that has been repeatedly attacked by its forces. He was with another journalist, Mustafa Thuraya, who was also killed in the attack.
A previous Israeli attack injured Wael and killed his cameraman Samer Abudaqa during a reporting mission in southern Gaza in December.
The Guardian newspaper reported in June that at least 23 members of the Al-Aqsa Network, a media channel linked to Hamas, have been killed by Israeli strikes since October.
Death toll exceeds 38,000
Gaza’s health ministry said Saturday that 87 people had been killed in the enclave in the past 48 hours, including the five journalists, bringing the number of people killed in the past nine months to at least 38,098.
More than 87,700 people were injured in the Israeli military offensive during the same period, the ministry said.
Tel Aviv Tribune’s Hani Mahmoud reported “an increase in airstrikes in the central area, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, as well as in the Shujayea neighborhood of Gaza City, in the north.”
In eastern Khan Younis and in the town of Rafah, on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, bodies were taken out of the hospital morgue for burial.
“This is a scene we have been seeing over and over for nine months, parents crying over the bodies of their children,” Mahmoud said. “It is heartbreaking and it is becoming the daily norm for people here.”
Among the victims of the recent attacks was an employee of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), after an Israeli strike hit the organization’s warehouses north of Maghazi camp in central Gaza, according to Tel Aviv Tribune’s fact-checking agency Sanad.
Another person was also killed in the attack on UNRWA premises.
Video footage verified by Sanad showed the arrival of their bodies, along with those of the wounded, at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah.
The UNRWA employee wore his jacket clearly identifying him as a UN staff member while working in the agency’s warehouses.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Information Center reported on Saturday that at least six policemen were killed in an Israeli shelling that hit their car in the western Saudi neighborhood of Rafah.
One person was also killed following an Israeli shelling of a police car in the al-Shakoush neighborhood of Gaza, northwest of Rafah.