Five journalists have been killed in an overnight Israeli strike that hit their vehicle in Gaza, a hospital and their news outlet said in a statement on Thursday.
The vehicle, belonging to Al-Quds Today Television, was parked outside Al-Awda Hospital when it was hit, according to the hospital. The Gaza-based television channel is affiliated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group.
Al-Quds Today Television condemned the attack and said the five were killed “while performing their journalistic and humanitarian duty.”
The Israel Defense Forces confirmed the strike, and said that a list discovered by its soldiers in Gaza “explicitly identified” four of the men killed as Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) members. The IDF published what it said was a copy of the list, edited to translate the names and details of the men.
“Intelligence from multiple sources confirmed that these individuals were Islamic Jihad operatives posing as journalists. One source was a list of Islamic Jihad operatives discovered by the IDF during operations in the Gaza Strip. This list explicitly identified four of the eliminated individuals as members of the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization,” the IDF said.
The IDF said four of the men had been involved in “combat propaganda,” describing one of them also as a former Islamic Jihad naval operative and another as a PIJ operations operative, and said the fifth was head of security for PIJ in Nuseirat.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a US-based non-profit group, has said at least 141 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and Lebanon since October 7th last year, “making it the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992.”
