Al Jazeera cameraman killed in Israeli drone strike on UN refugee center

An Israeli drone attack against a United Nations refugee center in southern Gaza Strip has killed a cameraman working for the Qatar-based television network Al Jazeera.

Samer Abu Daqqa, a photographer and farther of four, was killed at the Farhana School, which is a United Nations-flagged refugee center in the city of Khan Yunis, on Friday.

He had arrived there alongside the rest of Al Jazeera’s press crew to report on an earlier airstrike against the center.

The drone strike also wounded the network’s chief correspondent in Gaza, Wael Dahdouh.

Speaking from a hospital bed, Dahdouh said he had managed to walk to an ambulance, but Abu Daqqa lay bleeding at the school and died hours later.

In a statement, the Gaza-based Palestinian resistance movement of Hamas denounced the drone attack as “a deliberate attempt to intimidate media personnel from documenting the Zionist atrocities in the Gaza Strip.”

“This calls for widespread international condemnation and decisive measures to protect both civilians and journalists from the occupation Nazi army’s egregious acts,” the movement added.

It, however, noted, “We remain confident that journalists will not be deterred from fulfilling their vital roles in reporting on the occupation’s atrocities against our Palestinian people.” “Their unwavering commitment to their media and humane responsibilities ensures that their voices and cameras in the field will persist as witnesses to the ongoing genocide that afflicts humanity.”

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an independent and non-profit American NGO, at least 64 journalists and media workers have been killed since October 7, when the occupying regime unleashed an unrelenting genocidal war against the Gaza Strip.

Close to 19,000 people, most of them women and children, have been killed so far in the war that the regime launched following an operation staged by the coastal sliver’s resistance movements.