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 broke out on Oct. 7.
Those killed in Nuseirat were identified as Amjad Jahjouh and Rizq Abu Ashkian, both from the Palestinian 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 attack, 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 after an Israeli strike targeted a home belonging to the Madoukh family in the Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City.
Before the latest deadly attacks, Israel's war in 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 on Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza, put the number of media workers killed as of July 5 since the war began at 108, also 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 in Khan Younis in southern Gaza in January.
Hamza was in a vehicle near Al-Mawasi, a designated “safe zone” that Israel has repeatedly targeted. He was with another journalist, Mustafa Thuraya, who was also killed in the attack.
An earlier Israeli strike had wounded 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 Hamas-linked media outlet, had been killed in Israeli strikes since October.
The death toll exceeds 38,000
Gaza's health ministry said Saturday that 87 people were killed in the enclave over 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 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 “increased airstrikes in the central area, the southern part of the Gaza Strip and also in the Shujayea neighbourhood of Gaza City in the north.”
In eastern Khan Younis and in the town of Rafah, at the southern end of the Strip, bodies were being taken from the hospital morgue for burial.
“It’s a scene we’ve seen time and again over the past nine months: parents crying over the dead bodies of their children,” Mahmoud said. “It’s heartbreaking and it’s becoming an everyday occurrence for people here.”
Among the victims of the recent attacks was a worker with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) after an Israeli strike hit the organisation's warehouses north of Maghazi camp in central Gaza, according to Al Jazeera's fact-checking agency Sanad.
Another person was also killed in the attack on the UNRWA facility.
Video footage verified by Sanad showed the arrival of their bodies, as well as those of the wounded, at 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 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 as a result of an Israeli shelling of a police car in the al-Shakoush area of Gaza, northwest of Rafah.
