The Israeli military has killed at least 20 people, including four journalists serving international outlets, during back-to-back strikes against an overstretched hospital in the southern Gaza Strip.
On Monday, the regime carried out an airstrike against the Nasser Hospital in the city of Khan Yunis before backing it up with another raid, when civil defense and ambulance teams had scrambled to the site to help out the victims.
Various outlets, including resistance media channels, identified four of the fatalities as cameraman Hussam al-Masri, a contractor for the Reuters news agency, Mohammad Salama of the Al Jazeera television network, Mariam Abu Daqa, who used to report for The Independent Arabia and the Associated Press, and Moaz Abu Taha of the NBC.
Photographer Hatem Khaled, al-Masri’s fellow Reuters contractor, was also wounded in the attacks.
‘Systematic targeting’
Gaza’s government media office said the deaths had brought to 244 the number of journalists that had perished as a result of Israeli bloodletting throughout the coastal sliver since October 2023, when the regime started bringing the Palestinian territory under a wholesale war of genocide.
The office condemned the “systematic targeting of Palestinian journalists,” holding the regime as well as its main allies – the United States, the UK, Germany, and France – responsible.
It also called for international action to protect journalists in the war-battered territory.
The assassination spree followed hot on the heels of the regime’s targeted killing strikes against Al Jazeera’s media team in Gaza City, which claimed the lives of five media personnel, including heroic and celebrated journalist Anas al-Sharif.
Right up to his untimely demise, Sharif would provide the world with rare insights into the Israeli- and Western-created Palestinian plight through years-long untiring, and death-defying struggle.
Still reporting on the Monday strikes, Gaza’s civil defense apparatus announced that firefighter Imad Abdel Hakim al-Shaer was also among the fatalities of the attacks that also wounded seven other members of the apparatus’s Khan Younis chapter.
The massacre evoked reactions from international figures such as Francesca Albanese, an outspoken United Nations rapporteur, who has faced United States sanctions for her vociferous criticism of the regime.
“Scenes like this unfold every moment in Gaza, often unseen, largely undocumented. I beg STATES: How much more must be witnessed before you act to stop this carnage?” she asked in a post on X.
She advised the international community to break the regime’s near-total blockade of Gaza and slap it with an arms embargo and sanctions, while denouncing rescuers being “killed in line of duty.”
Gaza’s health ministry has, meanwhile, reported numerous injuries.
The genocide has so far claimed the lives of around 62,600 Palestinians, mostly women and children. In addition to incessant military attacks, it has been deploying starvation as a weapon of war towards what observers call maximizing suffering and casualties.
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