AN Al Jazeera journalist and his cameraman have been killed in an Israeli air attack on the Gaza Strip.
Journalist Ismail al-Ghoul and his cameraman Rami al-Rifi were killed when their car was hit on Wednesday in the Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City.
They were in the area to report from near the Gaza house of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas who was assassinated in the early hours of Wednesday in the Iranian capital of Tehran.
Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif, reporting from Gaza, was at the hospital where the bodies of his two colleagues were brought.
“Ismail was conveying the suffering of the displaced Palestinians and the suffering of the wounded and the massacres committed by the [Israeli] occupation against the innocent people in Gaza,” he said.
“The feeling – no words can describe what happened.”
The killings bring the total number of Al Jazeera journalists killed in Gaza since the beginning of the violence to four.
There has been no immediate comment from Israel, the broadcaster said.
Ismail and Rami – born in 1997 - were wearing media vests and there were identifying signs on their car when the attack too place, according to Al Jazeera.
The pair had last contacted their news desk 15 minutes before the strike, during which time they had reported a strike on a house near to where they were reporting. They were told to leave immediately.
They were travelling to Al-Ahli Arab Hospital when they were killed.
In a statement, Al Jazeera Media Network called the killings a “targeted assassination” by Israeli forces and pledged to “pursue all legal actions to prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes”.
“This latest attack on Al Jazeera journalists is part of a systematic targeting campaign against the network’s journalists and their families since October 2023,” the network said.
According to preliminary figures by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least 111 journalists and media workers are among those killed since the start of the war on October 7.
Mohamed Moawad, Al Jazeera Arabic managing editor, said the Qatar-based network’s journalists were killed on Wednesday as they were “courageously covering the events in northern Gaza”.
“Without Ismail, the world would not have seen the devastating images of these massacres,” Moawad wrote on X, adding that al-Ghoul “relentlessly covered the events and delivered the reality of Gaza to the world through Al Jazeera”.
“His voice has now been silenced, and there is no longer a need to call out to the world Ismail fulfilled his mission to his people and his homeland,” Moawad said.
“Shame on those who have failed the civilians, journalists, and humanity.”
