A photojournalist with Qatar-based news organization Al Jazeera has died while covering the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip.
Samer Abudaqa was wounded while covering an Israeli missile attack at a school in southern Gaza on Friday, Al Jazeera said in a news bulletin. His colleague, Wael Dahdouh, was also wounded by shrapnel in the attack.
Dahdouh was taken to a hospital for treatment. But an ambulance dispatched to the scene was unable to reach Abudaqa for hours, the network said. At first, paramedics were unable to reach the wounded photojournalist because of an Israeli blockade; paramedics were eventually given approval to pass, but had to turn around because of debris blocking the roadway, Al Jazeera reported.
Around 1:30 p.m. Eastern Time, Al Jazeera confirmed Abudaqa died from the injuries he sustained in the attack.
“Al Jazeera Media Network strongly condemns the Israeli attack that injured Wael Al Dahdouh, Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent, and Samer Abudaqa, the channel’s cameraman, during their coverage of the bombing of Farhana School in Khan Yunis on Friday,” a spokesperson for Al Jazeera said in a statement, adding that “Al Jazeera holds the Israeli Occupation Forces fully accountable for Samer’s safety, deeming this incident a deliberate attempt to target its correspondents and their families in the Gaza Strip.”
It was not immediately clear if Israeli forces knew Dahdouh and Abudaqa were in or near the school at the time of the attack.
The incident comes about a week after Al Jazeera and two other news organizations said they had evidence to support the claim that Israel had targeted a half-dozen journalists who were reporting inside Lebanon near the Israeli border in early October. A Reuters photojournalist was killed when two mortars fired from an Israeli tank landed near the scene of where the reporters were gathered, and two Al Jazeera journalists were among the wounded in the same incident.
