News - Middle East: The Hamas resistance movement has strongly condemned the deliberate targeting and killing of Palestinian journalists and media professionals by Israeli forces in Gaza, stating that such aggression constitutes a "war crime."

The Gaza-based group, in a statement late on Sunday, denounced the Israeli air strike that killed Palestinian journalist Ahmed al-Louh and five Palestinian Civil Defense workers in the central Gaza Strip earlier in the day.

The statement emphasized that such attacks are meant to “terrorize Palestinian journalists and prevent them from performing their role in exposing the crimes and atrocities being committed by the occupation army against our people and land.”

Hamas also call upon international press groups to take a firm stance against the Tel Aviv regime’s continued crimes against Palestinian journalists, provide them with all means of support, and expose the occupying entity’s brutal crimes against them.

Louh, who worked as a cameraman for the Qatar-based Al Jazeera television news network alongside other media outlets, was killed on Sunday in the strike on the Civil Defense post in the central Gaza’s Nuseirat camp, according to medics and local journalists.

Al Jazeera Arabic reported that the fallen Palestinian journalist was working while killed, wearing a press vest and helmet. He was taken to al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah city.

Al Jazeera Media Network condemned Louh’s killing, and called on human rights and media organizations “to condemn the Israeli Occupation’s systematic killing of journalists in cold blood, the evasion of responsibilities under international humanitarian law, and to bring the perpetrators of this heinous crime to justice”.

Additionally, the media office of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) censured the assassination of the Al Jazeera cameraman by the fascist Israeli army as a flagrant war crime, and in line with the continuous targeting of journalists in the Gaza Strip.

“The crime of killing journalists is part of the desperate and failed attempts by the Zionist enemy to hide the truth about its crimes against our people in the Gaza Strip. The assassination of Ahmed al-Louh and other media professionals will never stop other Palestinian journalists from playing their role in exposing the brutal and bloody crimes and massacres that the Zionist army is committing against the Palestinian people,” it stated.

His death brings to 196 the number of Palestinian media workers who lost their lives in the course of Israel’s war on Gaza, according to the strip’s Government Media Office.

Journalists working within the Gaza Strip encounter heightened risks while covering the genocidal war, particularly in light of Israeli ground offensives and airstrikes, as well as challenges such as disrupted communications, shortages of supplies, and power outages.

Backed by the United States and its Western allies, Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Flood against the Israeli regime in response to its decades-long campaign of oppression against Palestinians.

The regime’s bloody onslaught on Gaza has so far killed 45,028 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 106,962 others. Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under rubble.

Source: Press TV