The Health Ministry of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip and a Palestinian media outlet announced yesterday Monday the death of a journalist, who according to these sources was hit by Israeli fire the previous day in the southern part of the Palestinian enclave.

“The body of Ibrahim Muharreb was taken to Nasser Hospital” in Khan Younis on Monday, the ministry said.

The news website PDN (Palestinian Daily News), for which Ibrahim Muharreb mainly worked, reported that he was killed by “fire (…) of the Israeli occupation against him and a group of journalists” in the Hamad neighborhood of Khan Younis.

Two other journalists who were with him were wounded by gunfire and admitted to the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis where they are being treated, an AFP correspondent on the ground reported.

Videos circulating on social media sites, which AFP has so far been unable to verify, show an Israeli armored vehicle advancing towards the Hamad suburb amid gunfire. In the footage, a man in a bulletproof vest that reads “Guy” runs to escape the bullets, while a voice is heard saying: “Ibrahim has been hit—where is he?”

“The body of Ibrahim Muharreb was found (yesterday) morning in the suburb of Hamad”, a huge block of flats built by Qatar to be a showcase for the Gaza Strip, but has been reduced to rubble since the war broke out, triggered by a raid by the military arm Hamas against southern Israel on October 7.

Yesterday at Nasser Hospital, about thirty people chanted a prayer for the dead in front of his body, under a white funeral shroud, on which was left a bulletproof vest that read “Type”, an AFP cameraman recorded.

The Israeli army refused to comment on the circumstances of the journalist’s death without the exact geographical coordinates and a copy of his identity card.

“The Israeli army never deliberately and will never deliberately target journalists,” his spokesman assured.

The Union of Palestinian Journalists condemned the “assassination” of its member and accused the Israeli armed forces of conducting an “organized campaign” to “kill journalists” in Gaza.

Palestinian journalist Ibrahim Kanan, present at the funeral of Ibrahim Muharreb, accused Israel of “killing the truth”, “trying to eliminate every trace of the transmission to the outside world of what is happening in the Gaza Strip”.

Since the outbreak of the war, Israeli forces have killed many journalists whom they then accused of being “terrorists”, members of the armed wing of either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said yesterday it had counted as of August 19 “at least 113 journalists and media workers killed” during the war in the Gaza Strip, “the deadliest period for journalists since (the NGO) started keeping data in 1992” about the phenomenon.