The Government Media Office in the Gaza Strip says another Palestinian journalist has been killed in an Israeli airstrike, as the Israeli military forges ahead with its bloody ground and aerial offensives against the besieged coastal territory.
Ola al-Dahdouh, a journalist and presenter of the local Watan radio station, lost her life in an attack targeting her family house on al-Jalaa Street in central Gaza City late on Friday night.
She had previously worked for other radio stations and media institutions.
Her death brought the number of journalists killed in Israel’s ongoing onslaught on the Gaza Strip to 148 since October 7, 2023.
Journalists operating in the Palestinian territory are faced with increased dangers as they report on the conflict amidst Israeli ground assaults and airstrikes, disrupted communications, supply shortages, and power outages.
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The United Nations has raised concern over the “extraordinarily high numbers of journalists and media workers who have been killed, attacked, injured and detained” in recent months.
“We pay special tribute to the courage and resilience of journalists and media workers in Gaza who continue to put their own lives on the line every day in the course of duty, while also enduring enormous hardship and tragic loss of colleagues, friends and families in one of the bloodiest, most ruthless conflicts of our time,” UN experts said in a statement.
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after Palestinian resistance groups carried out a surprise retaliatory operation into the occupied territories.
Concomitantly with the war, the regime has been enforcing a near-total siege on the coastal territory, which has reduced the flow of foodstuffs, medicine, electricity, and water into the Palestinian territory into a trickle.
So far during the military onslaught, the regime has killed at least 36,379 Gazans, most of them women, children, and adolescents. Another 82,407 Palestinians have sustained injuries as well.