Palestinian Al Jazeera journalist Ismail al-Ghoul and his cameraman Rami al-Rifai were killed in an Israeli airstrike that hit their car in the Al-Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza city, on Wednesday, July 31.
The two journalists were wearing their press vests when their car, which has identifying signs, was struck by an Israeli drone. Ismail and Rami were near the house of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in order to report the reactions of people regarding Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran earlier on Wednesday.
In a statement published on Wednesday, Al Jazeera condemned “in the strongest terms the targeted assassination” of the two reporters. Al Jazeera added that the latest attack on its two journalists “is part of a systematic targeting campaign against the network’s journalists and their families since October 2023.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) issued a report on Thursday August 1, conveying that “CPJ’s preliminary investigations showed at least 113 journalists and media workers were among the more than 39,000 killed since the war began, making it the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992.”
While CPJ estimates that the number of journalists killed by Israel in Gaza is 113, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) reports that “more than 120 journalists have been killed by Israeli forces in the strip since 7 October 2023. At least 29 of them have been killed in circumstances that point to intentional targeting, in violation of international law.”
Nevertheless, the Palestinian government media office in Gaza announced that the death toll of Palestinian journalists in the Gaza strip has been taken to 165 after the assassination of Ismail al-GhIul and Rami al-Rifi.
Israel’s targeted assassination and assault against Palestinian journalists started way before October 7 in different parts of occupied Palestine. In May 2022, Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead by the Israeli occupation forces while covering raids carried out by Israel in the city of Jenin, in the northern occupied West Bank.
In November 2019, Palestinian photojournalist Muath Amarneh lost his left eye after being shot by an Israeli soldier while covering protests in the city of Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank.
The Israeli occupation has historically resorted to violence to silence Palestinians. In 1972, prominent Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani, then 36 years old then, was assassinated along with his 17-year-old niece Lamees Najim in a car bomb attack in Lebanon’s capital of Beirut. Israel’s Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations (Mossad) claimed responsibility for the assassination. It is believed that the Zionist entity perceived Kanafani, who lived in exile since he was a child after the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, as a threat due to his ability to transform the suffering of the Palestinian people into resistance literature.
However, decades after his assassination, Palestinians and pro-Palestinians still preserve Kanafani’s legacy and words, proving that his saying “bodies fall but ideas endure,” has been the inherited approach of the Palestinian people.
