Palestine TV, where Abu Hatab worked and which is run by the Palestinian Authority, said they were killed at home by an Israeli airstrike.
Credit: The New York Times
Mohammed Abu Hatab, a correspondent for a Palestinian television channel, and 11 members of his family were killed in the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza Strip on Thursday.
Palestine TV, where Abu Hatab worked and which is run by the Palestinian Authority, said they were killed at home by an Israeli airstrike. The Israeli military has not responded to a request for comment.
Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency, said Abu Hatab's wife, son and brother were among the dead.
The Committee to Protect Journalists said more media workers have been killed in the Israel-Hamas war than in any other conflict in the area since it started tracking the data in 1992. As of Friday, 36 media workers -- 31 Palestinians, four Israelis and one Lebanese -- have been killed since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct 7, the group said.
Photographs showed people searching through the rubble of the home Thursday and Friday, unearthing relics of the family's everyday life. At Abu Hatab's funeral on Friday, dozens of relatives, friends and fellow journalists wept and prayed above his shrouded body. Atop it rested a blue flak jacket and a microphone.
One of Abu Hatab's colleagues at Palestine TV, Salman Al-Bashir, discussed his death on air Thursday, in an emotional dispatch that the network also posted on social media. Speaking from the Nasser Hospital morgue, Al-Bashir removed his press vest and helmet, his voice breaking, as he lamented that not even protective gear -- the flak jacket says "Press," in blue capital letters -- has kept journalists alive.
An initial investigation by Reporters Without Borders, a media watchdog group, that was released Monday found that Issam Abdallah, a visual journalist for Reuters who was killed Oct 13, had been "targeted" by a strike that the group said came from the Israeli border. The Israeli army said it was reviewing the incident, adding that being near combat zones "comes with a severe risk to life."
Last week, in a letter to the Reuters and Agence France-Presse news agencies, the Israeli military said it could not guarantee the safety of reporters in Gaza because "Hamas has put its military operations in proximity to civilians and journalists."
Journalists on the ground in Gaza covering the daily horrors of the war have had to confront the terrifying possibility of losing their lives or their families. Wael al-Dahdouh, the Gaza bureau chief of Al Jazeera's Arabic-language service, learned while working that several members of his family had been killed, according to the news organisation.
While reporting live from Gaza City on Oct 25, al-Dahdouh was told that at least four members had been killed at the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, where they had been sheltering, by what Al Jazeera's parent company called an Israeli airstrike. He allowed Al Jazeera's cameras to record him with some of their bodies in the morgue of a hospital.