20 Killed in Gaza Hospital Strikes. Netanyahu Claims ‘Tragic Mishap.’

Shortly after 10 am Monday, when an Israeli military strike hit the facade of a hospital building in the southern Gaza Strip, emergency responders who were already nearby rushed to the scene. So did journalists.

But just minutes later, according to witnesses, hospital officials and video footage that captured the immediate aftermath of that first blast, a second strike hit the same part of the hospital, enveloping it in a thick cloud of smoke and dust.

Once the air cleared, the full extent of the horror at Nasser Hospital was revealed.

Four Palestinian journalists had been killed on the spot, and a fifth would later die of his wounds. At least 15 more people were killed, including members of the medical staff, rescue workers and patients, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Dozens more were injured, it said.

The Israeli military provided no immediate explanation for the attack, one of the deadliest for members of the news media, who have already died in unusually high numbers covering the war. The five journalists had worked for news outlets that included Reuters, The Associated Press and Al Jazeera, according to their employers.

The military acknowledged carrying out a strike in the area of Nasser Hospital, without saying what the target was. In a statement, it said that it regretted “any harm to uninvolved individuals” and that its chief of staff had ordered an immediate inquiry.

The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who generally casts civilian deaths in Gaza as a regrettable but unavoidable part of war, suggested that those Monday were the result of a military blunder.

“Israel deeply regrets the tragic mishap that occurred today at the Nasser Hospital,” the office said in a statement. It went on to say that “Israel values the work of journalists, medical staff and all civilians.”

But the rare expressions of regret did little to assuage the growing swell of local and international outrage.

Even before Monday, the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas had been one of the deadliest conflicts anywhere for journalists, with almost 200 killed since the fighting began, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The Israeli government has barred international journalists from entering Gaza to freely report on the war. That has left much of the world relying on local Palestinian journalists, reporting amid bombardment and widespread hunger, to understand the situation in the enclave.

“The killing of journalists in Gaza should shock the world — not into stunned silence — but into action, demanding accountability and justice,” the spokesperson for the United Nations human rights office, Ravina Shamdasani, said in a statement issued after the strikes.

In a joint letter sent by the AP and Reuters to Israeli officials later Monday, the agencies said they had found the Israeli military’s “willingness and ability to investigate itself in past incidents to rarely result in clarity and action.”

The circumstances of the attack, in the southern city of Khan Younis, were not immediately clear, and the military did not specify if the strikes had been carried out by missiles, tank fire or drones.

But Israel’s conduct in the war has prompted international censure of the soaring civilian death toll as well as Israeli restrictions on the entrance of aid. Parts of Gaza are now experiencing famine, according to a global group of experts backed by the United Nations.

More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to health officials there. Their tally does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, but it includes about 18,000 children and minors. The Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, that ignited the war killed around 1,200 people, with about 250 others taken as hostages to Gaza.

Some of Israel’s attacks on journalists have been intentional. A strike that killed several journalists in Gaza this month was aimed at Anas al-Sharif, a reporter with Al Jazeera, the Qatari-based network. Israel accused him of being a Hamas operative. Al Jazeera rejected that assertion.

On Monday, after one of its cameramen was killed, the network, which has frequently clashed with Israel, accused the Israeli military of killing its reporters as part of a “systematic campaign to silence the truth.”

Hamas, the Palestinian group that seized full control of Gaza in 2007, as well as news outlets that employed the journalists, identified the five journalists killed in the second strike as Hussam al-Masri, Mohammad Salama, Mariam Dagga, Moaz Abu Taha and Ahmed Abu Aziz.

The Gaza Health Ministry and hospital officials said that the strikes had hit the fourth floor of the hospital.

After the first blast, a live video feed from Al-Ghad TV, a pan-Arab broadcaster based in Cairo, showed emergency responders and others moving a white body bag on an exterior staircase. Shortly after, the second strike was captured live on camera. The video was verified by the Times.

Ayat Al-Haj, the hospital’s public relations coordinator, described a chaotic scene of choking smoke and dust. “We couldn’t see anything,” she said in a trembling voice, speaking by phone from her office after the strikes. “All we could hear were screams.”

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to questions as to whether its forces had conducted a “double tap” strike, meaning two strikes targeting the same location. Rights groups have deplored such attacks, which can put rescue workers and other civilians gathering to help the wounded in danger.

The Palestinian Civil Defence rescue service in Gaza said one of its crew members had been killed and seven others injured.

Reuters confirmed that Mr al-Masri had worked for the news agency as a contractor and said that a second contractor, a photographer named Hatem Khaled, had been injured. It said Mr Abu Taha had been a freelance journalist whose work was occasionally published by the agency.

Reuters said that it was “devastated” to learn of the losses and that it was “seeking more information from Israeli authorities about these latest strikes.”

The online outlet Middle East Eye identified Abu Aziz as a contributor to “dozens of reports” since the Gaza war began.

The AP said that Ms Dagga, 33, had been a visual-media journalist who freelanced for the agency, as well as for other news outlets, and that she “frequently based herself at Nasser Hospital, most recently reporting on doctors struggling to save children with no prior health issues who were wasting away from starvation.”

The news agency said that her 13-year-old son had been evacuated from Gaza earlier in the war, and said it was “shocked and saddened to learn” of her death.

The chief spokesperson for the Israeli military, Brigadier General Effie Defrin, said in a statement Monday evening that the military “does not intentionally target civilians” and that “reporting from an active war zone carries immense risk.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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