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Rabat – In a scene that has repeated far too often since October 7, Israel carried out two separate strikes targeting media personnel, killing Palestine Today journalist Mohammad Mansour and Al Jazeera journalist Housam Shabat.
Israel deliberately struck Mohammad Mansour in his home in Khan Yunis, killing him along with his wife and child, according to Al Jazeera.
Palestine Today released a statement informing of Mansour’s death and pointing out that this wasn’t the first time Israel targeted one of its media workers, “in October 2023, Israeli warplanes targeted the house of our colleague Mohammad Baaloucha, killing him along with his daughter and family member.”
Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reported Shabat’s death from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza saying that he had been previously wounded in an earlier Israeli attack but he insisted on keeping on reporting.
“The Israeli military targeted his vehicle” without “any prior warning”, said Abu Azzoum.
‘If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed’
Houssam Shabat, who had already survived a “double tap” attack in November, had already eulogized himself, leaving his final words to his team to share on social media. “If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed–most likely targeted–by the Israeli Occupation Forces,” he predicted in a somber message.
Shabat added that he was only 21-years-old when the Israel’s genocide in Gaza began, just a “college student with dreams like anyone else.”
In a statement that he had made in August, Shabbat referred to the unfairness that he and the Palestinian people have been enduring: “On these days, I was supposed to be walking the stage, graduating from college. Instead, I’m picking bags of charred, dismembered bodies of women and children.”
Shabat was once one of the last journalists remaining in northern Gaza during the total siege that starved many Palestinians to death. Refusing to leave his people, Shabat documented the Israeli-made horrors “minute by minute determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury,” added Shabat.
More people were introduced to Shabat in October 2024 when Israel put him on a list along with other Palestinian journalists, baselessly accusing them of being affiliated with “Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist” groups; thus creating a pretext for their killing.
In his August statement, Shabat said that he doesn’t fear death anymore, he fears a “life without dignity” and despite Israel’s attempts to dehumanize him and his people, he maintained his dignity and journalistic integrity to the last moment.
“By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now I am finally at rest– something I haven’t known for the past 18 months,” said Shabat’s last statement before his death.
Even in death, Shabat asked people to not stop speaking about Gaza, to not look away from the horrors that Palestinian journalists and civilians have been reporting, and to keep fighting and telling Palestinians’ stories until their homeland is free.
Gaza’s Government Media Office (GMO) released a statement yesterday announcing that Shabat and Mansour’s murders now bring the death toll at the hands of the IOF to 208 Palestinians. GMO held Israel and the United States as well as “the countries participating in the genocide, such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and France fully responsible for committing this heinous crime.”
When asked by the press about the deliberate killing of the two Palestinian journalists, a stone-faced Tammy Bruce, spokesperson for the United States Department of State, predictably blamed Hamas and “its choices to drag that region down into a level of suffering that has been excruciating.”
Earlier in February, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported that its preliminary investigations showed that 173 journalists and media workers have been killed by the IOF in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon since October 7, making it the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ records began in 1992.
