Israeli forces killed Middle East Eye journalists Mohamed Salama and Ahmed Abu Aziz on Monday, in a double-tap strike on the Nasser Hospital in the southern Gaza Strip.
Israeli forces bombed the fourth floor of the facility at around 11am local time (09:00 BST), then moments later, according to videos seen by MEE, fired a second missile deliberately at reporters, bystanders and first responders who had gathered to help recover the dead and wounded.
At the time of the attack, videos showed smoke billowing from an upper level at the hospital as rescue workers, standing on what appeared to be a staircase, appealed to those at ground level for help.
Then the second missile struck the exact area where they had amassed, with a correspondent for Jordan’s Al-Ghad TV channel crying out during a live broadcast that innocent people had been killed.
At least three other journalists were among the 19 Palestinians killed in the attack, including Mariam Dagga, a freelance reporter who worked with several media outlets including the Associated Press; Moaz Abu Taha, a journalist with NBC; and Hussam al-Masri, a photojournalist with the Reuters news agency.
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Salama, who started working with MEE shortly after Israel launched its genocidal campaign on the besieged enclave, also contributed for several other media outlets in a freelance capacity, most notably Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera Mubasher.
He filed regular reports for MEE and covered Israel’s siege on Al-Shifa Hospital, the furore over the now-pulled BBC documentary Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, and the killing of a frail 10-year-old boy, Abdulrahim ‘Amir’ al-Jarabe’a, at a GHF site in May.
Late last week, Salama spoke with MEE’s head of video production, Khaled Shalaby, about Israel’s starvation policy in the strip and discussed what he, and his partner Hala Asfour, a fellow journalist, also intended to cover in the week ahead.
In the phone call he said that he feared being targeted by Israeli forces following the recent assassination of Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Anas al-Sharif and several of his crew members.
‘Israel cannot hide the truth of the genocide it is waging in Gaza, so it is killing as many of those who record each strike as it can’
– David Hearst, editor-in-chief
The Israeli military claimed, without providing any evidence, that it killed Sharif because he “served as the head of a terrorist cell in the Hamas terrorist organisation.”
Since Israel launched its war on the enclave in October 2023, it has routinely accused Palestinian journalists in Gaza of being Hamas members as part of what rights groups say is an effort to discredit their reporting of Israeli abuses.
Meanwhile, Abu Aziz, a freelance journalist based in Khan Younis, had contributed to dozens of reports for MEE since the Israeli genocide in Gaza began in October 2023.
He constantly updated MEE’s newsdesk with updates from the enclave, despite suffering a serious back injury which went untreated due to the war.
David Hearst, the editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye, called Salama and Abu Aziz “exceptional journalists,” and said they were working in “near impossible conditions” before they were “murdered” by Israel.
“Israel cannot hide the truth of the genocide it is waging in Gaza, so it is killing as many of those who record each strike as it can,” he said.
“What Israel is doing in Gaza is terrorism practised by a state. In killing as many civilians and non combatants as it can, in targeting hospitals, first responders and journalists, it is seeking to terrorise Palestinians into fleeing abroad.
“It must not and cannot be allowed to succeed. It is up to every nation that calls itself civilised to stop it.”
MEE’s Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Lubna Masarwa, said that she was in deep shock over the journalists’ killings, and said that Abu Aziz, who she was in constant contact with, had a deep “love for life.”
“His stories were exceptional, as well very intimate,” she said. “He had capacity to see things others couldn’t and describe them in a detailed way.
“He had ambition, he was stubborn and he just kept going. He taught me that I could not afford to stop working on Gaza.”
Shortly after Monday’s attack, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, called on the international community to impose sanctions on Israel.
“Rescuers killed in line of duty. Scenes like this unfold every moment in Gaza, often unseen, largely undocumented,” she wrote.
“I beg states: how much more must be witnessed before you act to stop this carnage? Break the blockade. Impose an Arms Embargo. Impose Sanctions.”
More than 200,000 Palestinians have either been killed or wounded since Israel went to war in Gaza in October 2023, with recent reports, based on Israeli military intelligence data, claiming more than 80 percent of those killed in the enclave until May of this year were civilians.
Israel’s genocidal war has been described as the “worst ever conflict” for journalists, according to a report published in April by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
The report, titled News Graveyards: How Dangers to War Reporters Endanger the World, said the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip since October 2023 had “killed more journalists than the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined”.
