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 in June that at least 23 members of the Al-Aqsa network, a media channel linked to Hamas, were killed by Israeli strikes since October.
Death toll tops 38,000
Gaza’s Ministry of Health said on Saturday that 87 people were killed across the enclave over the last 48 hours, including the five journalists, bringing to at least 38,098 the number of people killed in the last nine months.
More than 87,700 people have been injured in Israel’s military offensive during the same period, the ministry said.
Reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud noted the “surge in air attacks across the central area, the southern part of the Gaza Strip, and also in Gaza City’s Shujayea neighbourhood in the north”.
In eastern Khan Younis and Rafah city, at the southern edge of the Strip, bodies were being taken out of the hospital morgue for burials.
“It’s a scene that we’ve been seeing over and over for the past nine months, crying parents over the bodies of their children,” Mahmoud said. “It’s heartbreaking and it’s becoming the daily norm for people here.”
Among the victims in the recent assaults was a worker for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) after an Israeli strike hit the organisation’s warehouses north of the Maghazi camp in central Gaza, according to Al Jazeera’s fact-checking agency Sanad.
Another person was also killed in that attack on the UNRWA facilities.
Video footage verified by Sanad showed the arrival of their bodies, as well as those injured, at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah.
The UNRWA employee was wearing his jacket clearly identifying him as UN staff while working in the agency’s warehouses.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Information Center reported on Saturday at least six policemen were killed in an Israeli bombardment that hit their car in the Saudi neighbourhood of western Rafah.
One person was also killed as a result of an Israeli bombing of a police car in Gaza’s al-Shakoush area, northwest of Rafah.