Israeli troops mistakenly shot three hostages to death on Friday in a battle-torn neighborhood of Gaza City.
The same day an Israeli strike killed a Palestinian journalist in the south of the besieged territory, underscoring the ferocity of Israel's ongoing onslaught.
The deaths were announced as a U.S. envoy tried to persuade the Israelis to scale back their campaign sooner rather than later.
The hostages were killed in the Gaza City area of Shijaiyah, where troops have been engaged in fierce fighting with Hamas militants in recent days. The soldiers mistakenly identified the three Israelis as a threat and opened fire on them, said the army's chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari.
He said it was believed that the three had either fled their captors or been abandoned.
"Perhaps in the last few days, or over the past day, we still don't know all the details, they reached this area," Hagari said. He said the army expressed "deep sorrow" and was investigating.
Hamas and other militants abducted more than 240 people in the Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war, and the hostages' plight has dominated public discourse in Israel ever since. Their families have led a powerful public campaign calling on the government to do more to bring them home.
Demonstrations in solidarity with the hostages and their families take place nearly every day.
Late Friday, hundreds of protesters blocked Tel Aviv's main highway in a spontaneous demonstration calling for the the hostages' return.
Israeli political and military leaders often say freeing all the hostages is their top aim in the war alongside destroying Hamas.
Still, in seven weeks since ground troops pushed into northern Gaza, they have not rescued any hostages, though they freed one early in the conflict and have found the bodies of several others. Hamas released over 100 in swaps for Palestinian prisoners last month, and more than 130 are believed to still be in captivity.
The three hostages were identified as young men who had been abducted from Israeli communities near the Gaza border - Yotam Haim, 28, Samer Al-Talalka 25, and Alon Shamriz, 26.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called their deaths an "unbearable tragedy" and vowed to continue "with a supreme effort to return all the hostages home safely."
In southern Gaza, the Al Jazeera television network said an Israeli strike Friday in the city of Khan Younis killed cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa and wounded its chief correspondent in Gaza, Wael Dahdouh. The two were reporting at a school that had been hit by an earlier airstrike when a drone launched a second strike, the network said.
Khan Younis has been the main target of Israel's ground offensive in the south.
Speaking from a hospital bed, Dahdouh told the network that he managed to walk to an ambulance. But Abu Daqqa lay bleeding in the school and died hours later. An ambulance tried to reach the school to evacuate him but had to turn back because roads were blocked by the rubble of destroyed houses, it said.
Dahdouh, a veteran of covering Israel-Gaza wars whose wife and children were killed by an Israeli strike earlier in the war, was wounded by shrapnel in his right arm.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Abu Daqqa is the 64th journalist to be killed since the conflict erupted: 57 Palestinians, four Israelis and three Lebanese journalists.
Palestinian U.N. Ambassador Riyad Mansour told a General Assembly meeting on the war that Israel "targets those who could document (their) crimes and inform the world, the journalists."
"We mourn one of those journalists, Samer Abu Daqqa, wounded in an Israeli drone strike and left to bleed to death for six hours while ambulances were prevented from reaching him," Mansour said.
The Israeli army did not immediately respond to an Associated Press request for comment about Abu Daqqa's death.
Israel's offensive has flattened much of northern Gaza and driven 80% of Gaza's population of 2.3 million from their homes. Displaced people have squeezed into shelters mainly in the south in a spiraling humanitarian crisis.
The offensive has killed more than 18,700 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza. Thousands more are missing and feared dead beneath the rubble.
The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths. Its latest count did not specify how many were women and children, but they have consistently made up around two-thirds of the dead in previous tallies.
While battered by the Israeli onslaught, Hamas has continued its attacks. On Friday it fired rockets from Gaza toward central Israel, setting off sirens in Jerusalem for the first time in weeks but causing no injuries.
The group's resilience called into question whether Israel can defeat it without wiping out the entire territory.
Israelis remain strongly supportive of the war and see it as necessary to prevent a repeat of the Hamas attack, in which militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians. A total of 116 soldiers have been killed in the ground offensive, which began on October 27.
U.S. President Joe Biden's administration has expressed unease over Israel's failure to reduce civilian casualties and its plans for the future of Gaza, but the White House continues to offer wholehearted support with weapons shipments and diplomatic backing.
