'Working as a journalist has become a life-and-death event'

Two Palestinian journalists and a media worker were burned alive in a targeted attack by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in Gaza overnight on Sunday and Monday, 6 and 7 April, once again highlighting the dangers faced by those covering the Gaza war and West Bank conflict.

- By Mel Frykberg

"An Israeli airstrike on a tent in the southern Gaza Strip on Sunday evening killed several journalists and a 27-year-old father who was working with an NBC News crew," the channel reported.

"The strike killed Ahmed Mansour, an editor with the Palestine Today news agency, and his coworker Hilmi Al-Faqawi. Yousef Al-Khozindar, a father of two working with NBC News to procure supplies and fuel, was in the tent next door being used by the news agency," said NBC.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) denounced Israel's targeted airstrike that hit the media tent in the grounds of a hospital in Gaza, killing the two journalists and injuring seven others, and called on the international community to act to stop Israel killing Palestinian journalists. Al-Khozindar later died from his burns, bringing the death toll to three.

Meanwhile, a Cost of War report by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University in the US says the war in Gaza has, since 7 October 2023, killed more journalists than the US Civil War, World Wars 1 and 2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan combined. More than 200 journalists, the vast majority Palestinian, have been killed in this conflict.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) stated in its press freedom report for 2024 that Israel, a country that has always prided itself on being the only democracy in the Middle East, had slid down to number 101 out of 180 countries for media freedom. South Africa came in at number 38.

Omar Nazzal from the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, who was held in Israeli administrative detention, or detention without trial, said covering the conflict had always been tough for Palestinian journalists because of attacks by Israeli soldiers, but the situation had escalated significantly since Hamas's October attack on Israel.