GAZA: The Gaza war raged on into a fourth month on Sunday as the Zionist army pounded the Palestinian territory with strikes. Zionist bombardments had killed at least 113 people in the past 24 hours, said the health ministry in the besieged territory run by Hamas, with two journalists among the victims when their car was struck in Rafah.

The journalists killed, who were working for Al Jazeera, were identified as Mustafa Thuria, a video stringer who also worked for AFP and other media, and Hamza Wael Dahdouh, the son of the Qatari network’s Gaza bureau chief who was recently wounded in a strike after his wife and two other children were killed in Zionist bombardment in the initial weeks of the war.

“Hamza was everything for me ... while we are full of humanity they (the Zionist entity) are full of murder and hatred,” Dahdouh said on Al Jazeera television. “I hope that the blood of my son Hamza is the last blood to flow of journalists as well as people in the Gaza Strip.” Dahdouh was seen in tears as he hugged his son’s body at a hospital surrounded by other journalists and relatives.

Thuria, in his 30s, had worked with Agence France-Presse since 2019 and had also worked with other media networks, including AP, Reuters, Al Jazeera and CNN, according to his AFP colleagues. The two men had been gone to film a strike on a house in Rafah earlier Sunday, and their car was hit while they were on their way back.

Al Jazeera on Sunday condemned the killing and targeting of Palestinian journalists in Gaza. "Al Jazeera Media Network strongly condemns the (Zionist) occupation forces' targeting of Palestinian journalists' car," the company said in a statement, accusing the Zionist entity of "violating the principles of freedom of the press".

By Dec 31, at least 77 journalists and media workers had been killed since the Oct 7 start of the war between the Zionist entity and Hamas, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. Of those killed, 70 were Palestinians and three Lebanese. The Hamas government media office said in a statement that “we condemn this heinous crime committed by the (Zionist) occupation army in a bid to intimidate and prevent media coverage”. “We are all shocked” by the news of the journalists’ deaths, said Christophe Deloire, the secretary general of the media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders on X, formerly Twitter.

Air strikes also claimed civilian lives in the southern cities of Khan Yunis and in Rafah where many displaced people have sought refuge, AFP correspondents reported. The Zionist entity is carrying out a relentless bombardment and ground invasion that have killed at least 22,835 people in Gaza, most of them women and children.

“These three months have been like a quarter of a century,” said one Gaza resident, Nabil Fathi, 51. “I wake up thinking this is a passing nightmare, but it is a reality. Our home and my son’s home have been destroyed and we have 20 people martyred in our family. I don’t know where we will go even if I survive.” Civilians in Gaza have borne the brunt of the conflict that has reduced swathes of the coastal territory to rubble and triggered a deepening humanitarian crisis. – AFP