Tel Aviv [Israel], July 7: At least five journalists were killed in attacks by Israeli forces in the last 24 hours in Gaza as bombings and air strikes across the besieged enclave intensified.
On Saturday, Gaza's Government Media Office said separate Israeli strikes killed three journalists in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the centre of the territory and two in Gaza City, raising to at least 158 the number of media workers killed since the current war erupted on October 7.
Those who were killed in Nuseirat were identified as Amjad Jahjouh and Rizq Abu Ashkian, both from the Palestine Media Agency, and Wafa Abu Dabaan from the Islamic University Radio in Gaza.
Abu Dabaan was married to Jahjouh. Their children were also killed during the strike, according to Al Jazeera's team on the ground. At least 10 people were killed in that attack on Nuseirat. Palestinian journalists Saadi Madoukh and Ahmed Sukkar were killed on Friday following an Israeli raid that targeted a home of the Madoukh family in the Daraj neighbourhood of Gaza City.
Before the latest deadly attacks, Israel's war on Gaza was already considered the deadliest conflict for journalists and media workers in the world.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which has a separate database on Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza, put the number of media workers killed as of July 5 at 108 since the war began, also making it the deadliest period since the group began gathering data in 1992.
Al Jazeera journalist, Hamza Dahdouh, the eldest son of Al Jazeera'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 Israel-designated "safe zone" that its forces have repeatedly attacked. He was with another journalist, Mustafa Thuraya, who was also killed in the attack. An earlier Israeli attack had wounded Wael and killed his cameraperson Samer Abudaqa during a reporting assignment in southern Gaza in December. The Guardian newspaper reported that at least 23 members of the Al-Aqsa network, a media channel linked to Hamas, were killed by Israeli strikes since October.
Source: Qatar Tribune