(Doha) Al Jazeera condemned the deaths on Wednesday of two of its journalists, killed during an Israeli strike on the Gaza Strip, denouncing in a statement a “cold-blooded assassination”.
The Qatari channel said its correspondent for Al Jazeera Arabic, Ismail al-Ghoul, and cameraman Rami al-Refee were “targeted by Israeli occupation forces” while covering the situation in the al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City.
“This attack on Al Jazeera journalists is part of a systematic targeting campaign targeting the channel’s journalists and their families since October 2023,” Al Jazeera added.
Since the start of the war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas in the Gaza Strip on October 7, Al Jazeera has provided continuous on-the-ground coverage of the effects of the Israeli offensive on the Palestinian territory.
His office in Gaza has already been bombed and two other correspondents killed.
The deaths of al-Ghoul and al-Refee underscore “the urgent need for immediate legal action against the occupation forces,” the channel said in its statement.
Al Jazeera said it would “take all possible legal action to prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes” and expressed its “unwavering solidarity with all journalists in Gaza.”
Hamas denounced a “heinous crime,” saying in a statement that Wednesday’s strike was aimed at “terrorizing and silencing” Palestinian journalists, who have been reporting on “the ongoing genocide against our people in the Gaza Strip for nearly ten months.”
“Transparent investigation”
For several years, Israeli authorities have publicly criticized the Qatari channel’s coverage of news in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, which has been heavily affected by the ongoing war in Gaza.
An Israeli court confirmed in June that it had extended the order to ban the channel, which broadcasts in Arabic and English, initially imposed on Al Jazeera in early May.
The spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned Wednesday’s deadly strike and called for it and other similar strikes to be “thoroughly and transparently investigated” and “accountable.”
In January, an Al Jazeera journalist and a freelancer were killed in a car bombing in the south of the Palestinian territory. Israel described them as “terrorist agents”,
The following month, Israel accused another journalist from the network, injured in a separate strike, of being a “deputy commander of a unit” of Hamas.
Al Jazeera has fiercely denied Israel’s allegations.
Its Gaza bureau chief, Wael al-Dahdouh, was wounded in an Israeli strike in December that killed a cameraman for the channel.
His wife, two of their children and a grandson were killed in the October bombing of the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip.
His eldest son was the Al Jazeera journalist killed in January in a strike targeting a car in Rafah.