An Israeli airstrike in Gaza has left an Al Jazeera correspondent and a photojournalist seriously injured. The incident occurred while they were documenting the living conditions of displaced Palestinian families in northern Rafah.
The correspondent, Ismail Abu Omar, and his camera operator, Ahmad Matar, were directly targeted by a missile fired by a drone. Both journalists were wearing protective equipment that identified them as media.
The two journalists were taken to Gaza’s European hospital, where doctors amputated Omar’s leg in an effort to save his life. Matar was described as being in a “serious condition”.
The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the strike, but the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said the two were hit in a strike from an Israeli warplane in the Moraj area.
The wounding of the two journalists follows the deaths of scores of Palestinian journalists working in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli military. The Committee to Protect Journalists has recorded the deaths of at least 85 journalists and media workers – 78 of them Palestinian – since the war erupted on 7 October.
This month a group of UN experts condemned the high death toll among journalists working in Gaza. “Journalists are entitled to protection as civilians under international humanitarian law. Targeted attacks and killings of journalists are war crimes,” the UN experts said.
Al Jazeera’s Gaza team has paid a particularly heavy price during the war. The channel’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael al-Dahdouh, lost his wife, son, daughter, and grandson in an Israeli air raid. Dahdouh was later wounded in an Israeli drone strike that killed his colleague, the Al Jazeera camera operator Samer Abu Daqqa, while Dahdouh’s eldest son, Hamza, a journalist who also worked with Al Jazeera, was killed in an Israeli attack alongside fellow journalist Mustafa Thuraya.
2024-02-13 09:17:02
Article from www.theguardian.com