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IDF strikes in Gaza said to kill at least 9, including Al Jazeera cameraman
Gaza health officials said Israeli strikes and gunfire on Saturday killed at least nine people, including an Al Jazeera cameraman who Israel accused of being a Hamas operative, in the latest violence to rock the coastal territory despite a ceasefire.
Israel and Hamas trade near-daily accusations of truce violations in the Gaza Strip, as progress on permanently ending the war sparked by the terror group’s October 7, 2023, attack remains stalled.
Medics reported that an Israeli airstrike killed three people, including a local photographer later identified as an employee of Qatar’s Al Jazeera, in the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip.
“Ahmed Wishah, a cameraman for Al Jazeera, has been killed in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a house,” the broadcaster said, while denouncing the attack as a “heinous crime.”
The Israel Defense Forces confirmed targeting Wishah, who a military spokesman told AFP “was a Hamas terrorist.”
The spokesman did not immediately provide evidence to support the military’s claim about Wishah, but said “there will be a statement issued with further details.”
Wishah’s brother Mohammed, also an Al Jazeera journalist, was killed in April by the IDF, who said he was a Hamas commander and shared past images of him holding a weapon.
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Al Jazeera, in a statement, said it “strongly condemns the heinous crime of targeting and killing” the Al Jazeera Mubasher correspondent.
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— Saad Abedine (@SaadAbedine) June 20, 2026
Earlier, the Hamas-controlled civil defense agency said an overnight Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City killed four members of the al-Safadi family, including the husband, wife and their two daughters, according to
It said the strike also injured 12 others.
The IDF said it struck a terror operative, without elaborating.
Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital confirmed receiving the bodies of four members of the al-Safadi family, including two children.
“Around 2 o’clock, my cousins were asleep when a missile struck them. They have no connection to Hamas, nor are they involved in anything. They’re just innocent children,” said Nael al-Safadi, a relative.
AFP footage from the scene showed an exterior wall of the apartment blown off, exposing rubble, clothes, mattresses and other household belongings strewn across the shattered interior.
“By God, I still feel as though I’m in a dream — I never expected this to happen to us,” Mohammad al-Safadi, who survived the strike, told AFP.
“I’m a civilian. I swear to God I’ve never carried a weapon or fired one. What do you want from me? Go after whoever you’re after, what’s my fault in this?”
Al-Shifa hospital, meanwhile, said it had received one body following a separate Israeli drone strike near an intersection in the north of Gaza City.
In another incident, Israeli forces allegedly shot and killed a woman in Beit Lahiya town further north, according to medics.
Later, an Israeli airstrike killed at least one person and wounded eight others in Khan Younis, south of the enclave.
The IDF did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the three incidents.
At least 1,012 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire took effect on October 10 last year, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures don’t differentiate between civilians and combatants.
The IDF has reported five deaths in its ranks during the same period.
