FIVE journalists were reportedly killed in Israeli attacks in the past 24 hours in Gaza, as bombings and airstrikes on the besieged territory intensify.
On Saturday (6/7), the Gaza Government Media Office said separate Israeli strikes killed three journalists in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the center of the territory and two in Gaza City, bringing to at least 158 the number of media workers killed since the current war erupted on Oct. 7.
Those 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 in the attack, according to Al Jazeera’s team on the ground. At least 10 people were killed in the attack in Nuseirat.
Palestinian journalists Saadi Madoukh and Ahmed Sukkar were killed on Friday (6/7) following an Israeli strike targeted the Madoukh family home in the Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City.
Before this latest deadly attack, Israel’s war on Gaza was already considered the deadliest conflict for journalists and media workers in the world.
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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 on July 5 at 108 since the war began, making it the deadliest period since the group began collecting data in 1992.
Al Jazeera journalist Hamza Dahdouh, the eldest son of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, was among those killed in an Israeli missile strike on Khan Younis, southern Gaza, in January.
Hamzah was in a vehicle near al-Mawasi, a safe zone designated by Israel that has been repeatedly attacked by its forces. He was with another journalist, Mustafa Thuraya, who was also killed in the attack.
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Previous Israeli strikes had wounded Wael and killed his cameraman Samer Abudaqa while on 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 Hamas-linked media outlet, had been killed by Israeli strikes since October.
The death toll reached 38,000
Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Saturday that 87 people were killed across the enclave over the past 48 hours, including five journalists, bringing the number of people killed in the past nine months to 38,098.
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“More than 87,700 people were injured in Israeli military attacks in the same period,” the ministry said.
Reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud noted a spike in air strikes in the central, southern Gaza Strip, as well as in the Shujayea neighbourhood of Gaza City in the north.
East of Khan Younis and the city of Rafah, on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, bodies were taken out of hospital morgues for burial.
“This is a scene we have seen over and over once more for the last nine months, parents crying over the bodies of their children,” said Mahmoud.
“This is heartbreaking and it is becoming a common thing for the people here,” he added.
Among the casualties in the recent attacks was a worker for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) following an Israeli strike hit the organisation’s warehouse north of Maghazi camp in central Gaza, according to Al Jazeera’s fact-checking agency Sanad.
Others were also killed in the attack on the UNRWA facility.
Video footage verified by Sanad shows the arrival of their bodies, as well as those of the wounded, at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital in Deir el-Balah.
The UNRWA employee was wearing a jacket that clearly identified him as a UN staff member while working in the agency’s warehouse.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Information Center reported on Saturday that at least six policemen were killed in an Israeli bombing that hit their car in the Saudi neighborhood of western Rafah.
One person was also killed in an Israeli bombing of a police car in Gaza’s al-Shakoush area, northwest of Rafah. (Aljazeera/Z-8)
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