The Israeli army killed five journalists in an attack on the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Monday, raising the toll of journalists who have been killed since the beginning of the genocide to 246.
On Monday morning at 10:05 am local time, the Israeli army targeted the stairwell of the fourth floor at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis twice in a “double-tap strike”. The bombings killed 20 people, including five journalists, a civil defense officer, a doctor, and a number of patients who were being treated at the hospital.
The first bombing killed Palestinian journalist Hussam al-Masri, a photographer working with Reuters. Al-Masri was broadcasting live on Reuters from Nasser Hospital when the first attack took place. The Reuters live video feed from the hospital suddenly shut off at the moment of the initial strike, Reuters footage showed.
After the bombing, civil defense first responders arrived at the location of the attack to rescue the injured and remove bodies. A number of journalists also arrived to cover the bombing. But shortly after the first responders and journalists arrived, at around 10:25 am, the Israeli army bombed the same location a second time.
The second bombing killed four other journalists, including Muhammad Salama, an Al Jazeera photographer, Maryam Abu Dagga, a contractor with The Associated Press (AP), Moaz Abu Taha, a Reuters and reported NBC contributor, and Ahmad Abu Aziz, a freelance journalist.
Muhammad Eslayeh, a contributor to Mondoweiss who was at the Nasser Hospital when the attack happened, survived with superficial injuries and described the scenes as “horrifying.”
“The place on the fourth floor [where the attack happened] is high up, and journalists always go there to document what’s happening on the ground. They can observe the bombing in Khan Younis, the tanks when they move to any place,” Eslayeh said.
He added that the place that was targeted was also used by journalists to try and pick up cellular service during Israeli-enforced internet blackouts in the Gaza Strip, further suggesting that it was likely known to the Israeli army that journalists frequent that specific area in the hospital.
Eslayeh and his colleague, Moaz Abu Taha, who was killed, were working together in a different area of the hospital when the first bombing took place. “Moaz took the camera and the mic and rushed to the place to cover the scene. Just as he arrived, along with other journalists and civil defense staff, the army bombed the same place again. I was on the ground floor looking at the scene and saw them getting bombed,” Eslayeh said.
“Moaz was killed in front of my eyes, he was only doing his job and documenting the Israeli massacrers in the hospital.”
The Gaza health ministry condemned the attack on the Naser Hospital, which it says is the “only operating hospital in the south of the Gaza Strip.”
Targeting the hospital and killing the medical staff, journalists, and civil defense workers is “a continuation of the systematic destruction of the health system and a continuation of the genocide,” the ministry’s statement said.
Al Jazeera condemned the killing of its journalists in Gaza, calling the Israeli army “journalist killers” in an article published on its website.
“Al Jazeera Media Network condemns, in the strongest possible terms, this horrific crime committed by the Israeli occupation forces, who have directly targeted and assassinated journalists as part of a systematic campaign to silence the truth,” the network said in a statement.
The AP reported on Mariam Dagga’s killing, saying she was a freelance journalist who worked with the agency. “She worked under incredibly difficult circumstances to bring stories from Gaza to the world, particularly coverage of the war’s impact on children,” said Julie Pace, AP’s Executive Editor and Senior Vice President. “We are devastated by her death and urgently seeking more clarity on the strike.”
In a report on the attack, Reuters said Hussam al-Masri, “a Reuters contractor” and Moaz Abu Taha,“a freelance journalist who worked with several news organisations including occasionally contributing to Reuters,” were killed, and that photographer Hatem Khaled, “also a Reuters contractor”, was injured.
In a statement, a Reuters spokesperson said the agency was “devastated” to learn of the attack, and that “we are urgently seeking more information and have asked authorities in Gaza and Israel to help us get urgent medical assistance for Hatem.”
Despite several reports that Abu Taha also freelanced with NBC news, the network has yet to release a statement on his killing or acknowledge their alleged working relationship with the journalist at the time of publication.
The Israeli army confirmed the targeting of Nasser Hospital in a statement saying that the Chief of the General Staff had instructed to conduct an initial “inquiry” as soon as possible.
“The IDF regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and does not target journalists as such. The IDF acts to mitigate harm to uninvolved individuals as much as possible while maintaining the safety of IDF troops,” the Israeli army posted on X.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office also said in a statement that Israel “deeply regretted” what it called “the tragic mishap that occurred today at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza.”
“Israel values the work of journalists, medical staff, and all civilians. The military authorities are conducting a thorough investigation,” Netanyahu’s office said. “Our war is with Hamas terrorists. Our just goals are defeating Hamas and bringing our hostages home.”
The statement did not acknowledge the targeted nature of the double-tap strike, which targeted the first responders and journalists after the initial attack.
The attack on the journalists at Nasser Hospital took place two weeks after the targeted assassination of Al Jazeera staff in Gaza City, including Anas al-Sharif and Muhammad Qreaqa.
Despite Israeli claims that Israel “values the work of journalists,” an April report by the “Costs of War” Project at Brown University indicates that the number of journalists killed in Gaza by Israel since October 7, 2023, ranges between 147 and 232, which is more than the total number killed in the American Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the American war in Afghanistan combined. Since that report, the number of journalists who have been killed in Gaza has reached 246.
Israel has also targeted the majority of Gaza’s hospitals, including the Nasser Hospital, several times since October 2023. Hundreds of medical staff in Gaza have been killed, injured, arrested, and tortured to death by Israeli forces.
This is a good point to take stock: Israel is starting to lose people who would describe themselves as militantly pro-Israel Jews. This essay appeared in the Times of Israel:
The legitimate response to Hamas’s October 7 attacks has devolved into something that violates every ethical principle Judaism holds sacred……As an American Jew and former US national security official, I have spent my adult life navigating the complex relationship between my Jewish identity, my American values, and my support for Israel. Like many in my generation, I was raised on stories of the Holocaust and the miracle of Israel’s rebirth, schooled in the necessity of Jewish self-determination, and taught that Israel represented the best of Jewish values made manifest in a modern democratic state. That faith is now shattered….The war in Gaza has revealed something deeply disturbing about what Israel has become under Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership – and about what American Jews like myself have enabled through decades of reflexive support and willful blindness. What we are witnessing is not just a military campaign gone awry, but the triumph of a destructive mythology, the Masada Complex: a siege mentality that glorifies victimhood, sanctifies self-destruction as heroism, and transforms every challenge into an existential battle that justifies any response, no matter how morally bankrupt….What began as a legitimate response to Hamas’s horrific October 7 attacks has devolved into something that violates every ethical principle Judaism holds sacred. Entire neighborhoods have been erased. Families starve while food trucks wait at borders. Children die from preventable diseases as food and medicine are weaponized. The images that flash across our screens each day represent not just a humanitarian catastrophe, but a moral collapse that should horrify anyone who claims to speak in the name of Jewish values….
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/what-netanyahus-israel-is-costing-american-jews/
The comments section of this piece contain the usual stuff: charges that the author is a ‘self-hating Jew’, etc.
Israel has now killed 245 Journalists in Gaza over the past 22 months. Two Strikes at the same target (with a delay between the first and the second strike) like today’s are done intentionally to kill journalists and aid workers. The evidence is staggering. And no IDF soldier is ever charged with a crime.
The world’s most perfect idiot. The threat or use of wars are illegal and prohibited by international law. So naturally the draft dodger with bone spurs thinks we need to rename the DoD to the War Department:
https://youtu.be/866ilSBIVCE
The Kellogg-Briand Pact of Paris, the Montevideo Convention, the Organization of American States, and the UN Charter are the reasons we don’t have one of those anymore.
The Atlantic Charter
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp
AUGUST 14, 1941
The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world.
First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other;
Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned;
Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them;
Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity;
Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security;
Sixth, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want;
Seventh, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance;
Eighth, they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential. They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measure which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Winston S. Churchill
Surely Israel doesn’t expect people to believe this. It expects people — some people, people in power — to pretend to believe these lies.
Does Israel have the right to defend itself? Look at the self it’s defending: not just a Jewish-Supremacist state, but a state that wants to get rid of all non-Jews (one way or another) from the territory it controls. And look at the means by which it is defending that state. No, it does not have that right.