By Nidal al-Mughrabi
CAIRO, June 20 (Reuters) - Israeli strikes and gunfire killed at least nine people, including a child and a journalist from Al Jazeera, in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, health officials said.
An Israeli airstrike killed four Palestinians, including two women and a child, in an apartment building in Gaza City, health officials said. The attack on the building in the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City destroyed the apartment and wounded several other people, medics added.
The Israeli military said it struck a militant, without elaborating.
In another incident, Israeli forces shot and killed a woman in Beit Lahiya town further north, medics said. An Israeli airstrike killed at least one person and wounded eight others in Khan Younis, south of the enclave.
Later on Saturday, an Israeli airstrike killed three people, medics said, including Ahmed Wishah, a journalist working for Al Jazeera, in the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip.
Al Jazeera said Wishah, a cameraman, was killed in what the network called a “heinous crime,” about two months after his brother, Mohammed Wishah, also an Al Jazeera journalist, was killed by the Israeli military.
The Palestinian Journalist Syndicate condemned Wishah’s killing on Saturday and called for Israeli leaders to be held accountable for such attacks, which have killed nearly 300 Palestinian journalists since the war began in October 2023.
Israel has often claimed without evidence that the journalists it has targeted in Gaza were linked to militants, including Hamas.
The Israeli military said in a statement it killed a Hamas militant, who posed a threat and served as an Al Jazeera photojournalist. It did not provide evidence. It said Wishah served as a “sniper,” adding that he was killed along with two other Hamas militants.
It had also accused the brother it killed in April of being a senior Hamas armed operative. Hamas and Al Jazeera denied that Wishah had any affiliation with the group.
“Al Jazeera Media Network condemns the deliberate killing of its Al Jazeera Mubasher Channel’s cameraman Ahmed Wishah by Israeli occupation forces today, Saturday 20 June, in an Israeli bombardment that targeted a house in the Bureij camp in the central Gaza Strip,” Al Jazeera said in a statement.
The latest killing raised the number of Al Jazeera journalists killed by Israel in Gaza since October 2023 to 12, Al Jazeera said.
An October ceasefire has halted major fighting between Hamas and Israel, but it has not ended Israeli attacks.
Gaza’s health ministry said more than 1,010 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli fire since the ceasefire. Militants killed four Israeli soldiers in Gaza over the same period.
Israel says its strikes are aimed at thwarting imminent attacks by Hamas and other militants. Hamas rarely discloses information about the deaths of its fighters.
Israel and Hamas remain deadlocked over how to proceed with the next stage of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Gaza plan, which involves Hamas laying down its arms and Israeli withdrawals.
Talks held by mediators Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and Trump’s Board of Peace envoy for Gaza, Nickolay Mladenov, over the implementation of the second phase of Trump’s Gaza plan, have not yet reached an agreement, sources close to the talks said.
Israel says Hamas must cede power in Gaza, disarm, and play no role in the future governance of the enclave. Hamas links any full disarmament to launching a political track towards establishing a Palestinian state.
Hamas-led fighters killed 1,200 people during their cross-border attack into Israel on October 7, 2023, according to Israeli tallies. The Gaza health ministry said more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in the territory since then.
(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi; Editing by Jan Harvey, William Maclean, Rod Nickel)
