Sawt Falasteen - Journalist for Al Jazeera killed in Gaza, 7 days into Israeli offensive

Israel resumed intense air strikes across the densely populated Gaza Strip last Tuesday, with ground troops following, after talks on extending a ceasefire with Hamas Palestinian militants reached an impasse.

Civil defence said Hussam Shabat, who was working with the Qatari news channel, was targeted in an Israeli drone strike on his car on Monday afternoon near a petrol station in the northern town of Beit Lahia.

Mahmud Bassal, spokesman for the civil defence agency, said air strikes had targeted more than 10 cars including Shabat's in various areas of the Gaza Strip.

"Hussam Shabat, a journalist collaborating with Al Jazeera Mubasher, was martyred in an Israeli strike targeting his car in the northern Gaza Strip," an Al Jazeera alert said, referring to the network's live Arabic channel.

AFPTV footage from the scene in Beit Lahia showed Palestinians gathering around the car, which had an Al Jazeera sticker on its windscreen and whose rear window was severely damaged. A body could be seen on the ground nearby.

According to the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists, Israel's military in October accused Shabat and five other Palestinian journalists of being militants, which he denied.

AFP journalists reported hundreds of people attending Shabat's funeral held at Beit Lahia's Indonesian Hospital, praying over his body which still wore a press flak jacket.

Relatives and colleagues, their faces covered in tears, carried the body on a stretcher through the streets flanked by rows of tents that displaced Gazans use as shelters.

The civil defence agency said a media worker from Islamic Jihad-affiliated Palestine Today TV, Muhammad Mansour, was killed in a separate air strike "that targeted his home in Khan Yunis", in Gaza's south.

In a statement, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate called the deaths of Shabat and Mansour "a crime added to the record of Israeli terrorism."

It said that more than 206 journalists and media workers had been killed since the start of the war, triggered by Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

- Civilians 'trapped' -

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said Monday that 730 people had been killed since Israel resumed bombardments on March 18, including 57 in the past 24 hours.

Israel's military said it intercepted two "projectiles" launched on Monday from the Gaza Strip, after air raid sirens sounded in Israeli communities near the territory.

On Friday the military also said it intercepted two projectiles fired from Gaza.

Hamas's first military response to the renewed civilian death toll came last Thursday when it announced rocket fire on Tel Aviv. The military said one projectile was intercepted while two others hit an uninhabited area.

The municipality in the southern Gaza city of Rafah said in a statement Monday that "thousands of civilians" were "trapped under intense Israeli shelling" in the city's Tal al-Sultan neighbourhood.

It added that all communications were cut with the neighbourhood, and that the local health care system had "entirely collapsed", causing those wounded to be left unattended.

On Sunday the military said it had encircled Tal al-Sultan to "dismantle terrorist infrastructure and eliminate" militants there.

Gaza's civil defence agency said that 50,000 displaced civilians were now left without humanitarian and medical services.

It said in a separate statement that one attack on Sunday in the Tal al-Sultan area "left dozens of civilians wounded or killed".

The International Red Cross Society (ICRC) reported on Monday that one of its Rafah offices "was damaged by an explosive projectile".

It said that escalation of hostilities over the past week has left "hundreds of civilians killed, some of whom remain buried under rubble while others have been left behind unable to be rescued."

Israel's military said Sunday its troops were also active on the ground in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanun, with backing from fighter jets strikes.

U.Shaheen--SF-PST