The Israeli military said in a statement on Tuesday that a double-strike on a hospital in the Gaza strip was targeting what they believed to be a Hamas surveillance camera, as well as what it believed were people identified as militants.
The Israeli strike on Monday — called a "double tap" because it hit the same spot twice — killed at least 20 people, including five journalists and medics who had rushed to the scene after the first strike. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the attack a "tragic mishap."
Among those killed was Mariam Dagga. She was 33 years old, a mom to her 13-year-old son and — through her work as a visual journalist with the Associated Press — the eyes and ears on the ground in Gaza for news outlets around the world.
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Her death, and that of the four other journalists killed, leaves a vacuum of coverage.
Dagga and her camera bore witness to the war in Gaza. She often spent her time documenting the work of doctors at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, as they tried to save the dying. It is a fate that would become her own on Monday, when Israeli airstrikes on the hospital killed her and at least 20 people, including four other journalists who worked for news outlets including Reuters and Al Jazeera, among others: Mohammad Salama, Moaz Abu Taha, Ahmed Abu Aziz and Hussam al-Masri.
"I, as a specialist in conflict photography and a press freedom advocate, this is outrageous. It's enraging, it's infuriating. It is attack after attack on media and press freedom," said Dr. Lauren Walsh, director of the Photojournalism Intensive at New York University's Gallatin School.
Walsh said the work of journalists, like Dagga, is crucial.
"All the journalists, photojournalists and all of their colleagues — they are eyewitness, they're providing the eyewitness accounts," Walsh said. "They are creating the evidence for what is happening."
Unlike coverage in other war zones, Walsh said the journalists in Gaza cannot leave.
"In Gaza, the journalists are also dealing with starvation, lack of sleep, the death of family members, friends, colleagues, displacement after displacement after displacement," she said. "So, the intensity of all of it is, is absolutely enormous."
Recently, Mariam Dagga turned her lens to the starvation gripping Gaza and its effect on the children who live there — the subject of the last story she filed before her death.
"I think that this is the time where if western journalists do not robustly stand in solidarity and demand urgent access to Gaza and continue to report on the West Bank and east Jerusalem, what happens to the Palestinian state, then they would really had failed their role in these historical moments," said Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian Territories.
One of the reasons that news outlets around the world are so reliant on Palestinian journalists to cover the war is that Israel has banned international, independent journalists from entering the Gaza strip. As it stands right now, all of the reporting coming out of Gaza is being shouldered by the Palestinian journalists trapped inside.
