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A man hold up the press vest belonging to Al Jazeera correspondent, Wael Al Dahdouh, who was injured in an Israeli strike against a UN refugee center in the city of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza Strip on December 15, 2023.
The Gaza-based Palestinian resistance movement of Hamas has denounced back-to-back Israeli attacks targeting a UN refugee center and the journalists and media personnel, who arrived subsequently to cover the first atrocity.
According to a statement released by the movement on Friday, the regime struck the Farhana School, a United Nations-flagged refugee center, in the city of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza earlier.
"Subsequently, the Israeli criminals executed a second premeditated bombing, aimed at the press crews dispatched to report on the initial attack," the statement added.
According to the group, the second attack injured numerous people, including Al Jazeera correspondent Wael Al Dahdouh, and photographer Samer Abu Daqqa, who similarly works for the Qatar-based television network.
Abu Daqqa, a father of four, died of his injuries after medical teams were prevented by Israeli forces from immediately reaching him.
Hamas described the attacks as "a heinous, multifaceted crime," and "part of the Zionist occupation war to exterminate our people."
"It signifies a deliberate attempt to intimidate media personnel from documenting the Zionist atrocities in the Gaza Strip," it said.
Journalists, however, would remain undeterred in fulfilling their duty to "report on the occupation’s atrocities against our Palestinian people," asserted the movement.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an American independent and non-profit NGO, at least 64 journalists and media workers have been killed since October 7, when the occupying regime unleashed an unrelenting genocidal war against the Gaza Strip.
Close to 19,000 people, most of them women and children, have been killed so far in the war that the regime launched following an operation staged by the coastal sliver’s resistance movements.
