GAZA: A Palestinian TV channel affiliated with a group said five of its journalists were killed on Thursday in an Israeli strike on their vehicle in Gaza. A missile hit the journalists' broadcast truck as it was parked in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, according to a statement from their employer, Al-Quds Today. The station identified the five staffers as Faisal Abu al-Qumsan, Ayman al-Jadi, Ibrahim Al-Sheikh Khalil, Fadi Hassouna and Mohammed al-Lada'a. They were killed "while performing their journalistic and humanitarian duty," the statement said. "We affirm our commitment to continue our resistant media message," it added.
The Israeli military said in its own statement that it had conducted "a precise strike on a vehicle with an Islamic Jihad cell inside in the area of Nuseirat." It added that "prior to the strike, numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians." In a later statement naming the five killed, the military said intelligence had "confirmed that these individuals were Islamic Jihad operatives posing as journalists."
According to witnesses in Nuseirat, a missile fired by an Israeli aircraft hit the broadcast vehicle, which was parked outside Al-Awda Hospital, setting the vehicle on fire and killing those inside. The Committee to Protect Journalists' Middle East arm said the organisation was "devastated by the reports that five journalists and media workers were killed inside their broadcasting vehicle by an Israeli strike". "Journalists are civilians and must always be protected," it added in a statement on social media.
The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said last week that more than 190 journalists had been killed and at least 400 injured since the start of the war in Gaza. Israel's retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 45,399 people in Gaza, a majority of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory's health ministry that the UN considers reliable.
Meanwhile, Israel's National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir visited Al-Aqsa mosque compound on Thursday, triggering angry reactions from the Palestinian Authority and Jordan accusing the far-right politician of a deliberate provocation. Ben Gvir has repeatedly defied the Israeli government's longstanding ban on Jewish prayer at the site in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, which is revered by both Muslims and Jews and has been a focal point of tensions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The chief paediatric doctor at a southern Gaza hospital said that three babies had died of "severe temperature drop" this week, as the war-ravaged Palestinian territory grapples with winter cold. In the most recent case, Dr Ahmed al-Farra of Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis city said a three-week-old girl "was brought to the emergency room with a severe temperature drop, which led to her death". Farra, the head of the hospital's paediatric services, mentioned two other cases his team handled on Tuesday. "A three-day-old baby and another baby, less than a month old, both died after a severe temperature drop," he said. "This is due to the fact that they live in tents," added the doctor, referring to Palestinians displaced by the more than 14-month war in Gaza who have sought shelter in makeshift camps, many in the coastal Khan Yunis area. "The tents do not protect from the cold and it gets very cold at night, with no way to keep warm," said Farra. — AFP
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