Al Jazeera journalist, cameraman killed in Israeli attack on Gaza

Al Jazeera Arabic journalist Ismail al-Ghoul and his cameraman Rami al-Rifi have been killed in an Israeli air attack on the Gaza Strip.

The reporters were killed when their car was hit on Wednesday in the Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City, according to initial information.

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 Iran’s capital, Tehran, in an attack the group has blamed on Israel.

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.”

Ismail and Rami were wearing media vests and there were identifying signs on their car when they were attacked. They had last contacted their news desk 15 minutes before the strike.

During the call, they had reported a strike on a house near to where they were reporting and were told to leave immediately. They did, and were traveling to Al-Ahli Arab Hospital when they were killed.

There was no immediate comment by Israel, which has previously denied targeting journalists in its 10-month war on Gaza, which has killed at least 39,445 people, the vast majority of whom were children and women.

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.

Here is Ismail’s tribute to himself and the dying humanity.

“Let me tell you, my friend, that I no longer know the taste of sleep. The bodies of children and the screams of the injured and their blood-soaked images never leave my sight. The cries of mothers and the wailing of… pic.twitter.com/o91d4fTLho

— Mohamed Moawad (@moawady) July 31, 2024

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. The Gaza government media office has put the figure at 165 Palestinian journalists killed since the war began.

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”.

Ismail was renowned for his professionalism and dedication, bringing the world’s attention to the suffering and atrocities committed in Gaza, especially at al-Shifa Hospital and the northern neighbourhoods of the besieged enclave.

His wife has been living in a camp for internally displaced people in central Gaza and had not seen her husband for months. He is also survived by a young daughter.

Both Ismail and Rami were born in 1997.

“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.”

The killings on Wednesday bring the total number of Al Jazeera journalists killed in Gaza since the beginning of the war to four.

In December, Al Jazeera Arabic journalist Samer Abudaqa was killed in an Israeli strike in Khan Younis. Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh, was also wounded in that attack. Dadouh’s wife, son, daughter and grandson had been killed in an Israeli air raid on the Nuseirat refugee camp in October.

In January, Dahdouh’s son, Hamza, who was also an Al Jazeera journalist, was killed in an Israeli missile strike in Khan Younis.

Prior to the war, Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead by an Israeli soldier as she covered an Israeli raid in Jenin in the occupied West Bank in May 2022. While Israel has acknowledged its soldier likely fatally shot Abu Akleh, it has not pursued any criminal investigation into her death.

Reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza on Wednesday, Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary reflected on the daily dangers journalists face.

“We do everything [to stay safe]. We wear our press jackets. We wear our helmets. We try not to go anywhere that is not safe. We try to go to places where we can maintain our security,” she said. “But we have been targeted in normal places where normal citizens are.”

She added: “We’re trying to do everything, but at the same time, we want to report, we want to tell the world what’s going on.”

Jodie Ginsberg, the president of the CPJ, said the killing of al-Ghoul and al-Refee is the latest example of the risks of documenting the war in Gaza, which is the deadliest conflict for journalists the organisation has documented in 30 years.

Ginsberg told Al Jazeera the organisation has found at least three journalists have been directly targeted by Israeli forces in Gaza since the war began.

She said CPJ is investigating an additional 10 cases, while noting the difficulty of determining the full details without access to Gaza.

“That’s not just a pattern we’ve seen in this conflict, it appears to be part of a broader [Israeli] strategy that aims to stifle the information coming out of Gaza,” Ginsberg said, citing the ban on Al Jazeera from reporting in Israel as part of this trend.