Nearly 110 journalists, including 11 women, have been killed while carrying out their professional duties in the Gaza Strip since the armed conflict between Israel and the Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas escalated, Muslim News findings have revealed.
The casualty figure was contained in a report published on Sunday, January 7 by the media relations department in Gaza, although Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)’s preliminary investigations claimed at least 79 journalists and media workers have been killed.
Palestinian media department said, “the number of journalists killed since the beginning of the war in Gaza has reached 109. Members of the Qatari TV broadcaster, Al-Jazeera, Hamza Al-Dahdouh and Mustafa Thuraya, were the latest victims of Israeli strikes on the Palestinian enclave.”
Hamza is Al-Jazeera’s Gaza Bureau chief, Wael Al-Dahdouh’s fifth family member to be killed by an airstrike, which also claimed the lives of his wife, two other children and a grandson in November.
Al-Jazeera Media Network denounced “in the strongest terms this heinous crime” committed by the “Israeli occupation army against journalists.”
92 days of aggression and 107 journalists killed by the Israeli occupation. pic.twitter.com/50HQOihzBT
— TIMES OF GAZA (@Timesofgaza) January 6, 2024
Israel aims to “intimidate journalists in a failed attempt to obscure the truth and prevent media coverage,” the office added.
The media office called “on all press unions, human rights and legal bodies to condemn this crime and denounce its repeated commission by the occupation.”
It also called for pressuring “the occupation to stop the genocidal war against our defenseless people in the Gaza Strip.”
Murder of female journalists
The Egyptian news portal Al-Youm As-Sabia also reported that there are at least 11 women among the press workers who died in Gaza: all of them were journalists and reporters for various television channels who were killed as a result of Israeli strikes.
Several human rights and journalism bodies including CPJ, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International have condemned Israeli’s attacks on journalists, as they called on Israel’s allies – the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Germany – to “suspend military assistance and arms sales to Israel, given the risk they will be used for grave abuses”.
“No journalist should ever be targeted or killed simply for carrying out their work. Israel must not be allowed to kill and attack journalists with impunity,” said Aya Majzoub, Amnesty’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa
Since Hamas’ cross-border attack on Oct. 7, Israel has continued relentless attacks on the Gaza Strip, killing at least 22,722 Palestinians and injuring 58,166, according to local health authorities.
Israeli authorities claim that the Hamas attacks have killed around 1,200 Israelis.
The Israeli onslaught has left Gaza in ruins, with 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure damaged or destroyed and nearly two million residents displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine.
The war has also led to “the deadliest month for journalists” since CPJ began tracking data in 1992.
Over 22 years, CPJ has documented at least 20 journalist killings by the Israeli army. No one has ever been charged or held responsible for these deaths.
The organisation said the impunity in these cases has severely undermined the freedom of the press, leaving journalists vulnerable to attack.
With additional information from Al-Jazeera, Reuters, CPJ websites.