Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief's son killed in apparent Israeli strike alongside fellow journalist, network says
The son of Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief Wael Al-Dahdouh was killed in an apparent Israeli airstrike on Sunday.
His son's death comes just months after his wife, two children and grandchild were killed in a strike he himself reported on before he learned of their deaths.
The network reported that Wael’s photojournalist son Hamza Wael Al-Dahdouh, 27, was killed west of Khan Younis on Thursday, alongside Al Jazeera employee Mustafa Thuraya. Their driver was also killed and another person was critically injured, local journalists told CNN.
"There is nothing more painful than losing your own blood and especially your own eldest son. Hamza was me, my soulmate and everything," Al-Dahdouh said during a live interview on Al Jazeera on Sunday.
"Yes, we cry and cry, but these are the tears of humanity, tears of generosity and magnanimity, but these are not the tears of fear."
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said even before their deaths that more journalists were killed in the first 10 weeks of the Israel-Hamas war than had ever been killed in a single country in an entire year.
Al-Dahdouh also spoke at his son’s funeral on Sunday, saying that he hoped Hamza’s death would be the last.
“I wish that the blood of my son will be the last of those journalists killed and those killed in this massacre,” he said in video broadcast by Al Jazeera. Pictures from the funeral showed Al-Dahdouh, wearing his press vest, holding his son’s lifeless hand and kissing it repeatedly as he wept.
Al-Dahdouh’s own hand was bandaged. He was injured in an attack that killed his colleague Samer Abu Daqqa in December.
The Israel Defense Forces did not immediately respond to a CNN question about the apparent airstrike that killed the two Al Jazeera employees on Sunday.
The Israeli military has said in the past that it never intentionally targets journalists.
But the CPJ, which promotes press freedom worldwide, said 77 journalists and media workers were killed in Gaza between October 7 and December 31. Of those 70 were Palestinians, four Israeli and three Lebanese.
Wael Al-Dahdouh’s wife, son, daughter, and grandson were killed in October in an explosion at the house where they were sheltering in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. The IDF told CNN it had carried out an airstrike in an area of Gaza where Al-Dahdouh’s relatives were killed while it was targeting “Hamas terrorist infrastructure.”
No comments: