Five journalists killed as Israel steps up bombardment of Gaza | News on Israel-Palestine conflict

The journalist couple Amjad Jahjouh and Wafa Abu Dabaan and their children were killed in an attack on the Nuseirat camp.

At least five journalists have been killed in attacks by Israeli forces in Gaza over the past 24 hours, as bombings and airstrikes on the besieged enclave intensified.

On Saturday, Gaza’s state media office said that separate Israeli strikes had killed three journalists in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the center of the area and two in Gaza City, bringing the number of media workers killed since the current war began on October 7 to at least 158.

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 Al Jazeera’s team on the ground. At least ten people were killed in the attack on Nuseirat.

Palestinian journalists Saadi Madoukh and Ahmed Sukkar were killed on Friday in an Israeli attack on the Madoukh family home in the Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City.

Before the recent 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 maintains a separate database of Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza, put the number of media workers killed since the war began as of July 5 at 108, making it the deadliest period since the group began collecting data in 1992.

Al Jazeera journalist Hamza Dahdouh, the eldest son of Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, was among those killed in an Israeli rocket attack in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip in January.

Hamza was in a vehicle near al-Mawasi, an area designated by Israel as a “security zone” that has been repeatedly attacked by Israeli forces. He was travelling with another journalist, Mustafa Thuraya, who was also killed in the attack.

In an earlier Israeli attack in December, Wael was injured while on a reporting assignment in the southern Gaza Strip and his cameraman Samer Abudaqa was killed.

The Israeli daily The Guardian reported in June that at least 23 members of the Al-Aqsa network, a Hamas-affiliated media outlet, had been killed in Israeli attacks since October.

Death toll exceeds 38,000

The Gaza Health Ministry said on Saturday that 87 people, including the five journalists, had been killed across the enclave in the past 48 hours, 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.

Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud reported from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, noting that “airstrikes have increased throughout the center, in the southern part of Gaza and also in the Shujayea neighborhood in the north of Gaza city.”

In eastern Khan Younis and in the city of Rafah on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, bodies were taken from the hospital morgue for burial.

“This is a scene we have seen over and over again in the last nine months: parents crying over the bodies of their children,” Mahmoud said. “It is heartbreaking and is becoming an everyday norm for people here.”

Among the victims of the latest attacks was an employee of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), according to Al Jazeera’s fact-checking agency Sanad, after an Israeli strike hit the organization’s warehouses north of Maghazi camp in central Gaza.

Another person was also killed in this attack on UNRWA facilities.

Video footage verified by Sanad showed the arrival of their bodies and those of the injured at Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital in Deir el-Balah.

While working in the agency’s camps, the UNRWA employee wore a jacket that clearly identified him as a UN employee.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Information Center reported on Saturday that at least six police officers were killed in an Israeli bombardment that hit their car in the Saudi neighborhood in western Rafah.

In addition, one person was killed in an Israeli bomb attack on a police car in the Gaza Strip’s al-Shakoush neighborhood, northwest of Rafah.