Ahmed Al-Louh, a 39-year-old Palestinian journalist who freelanced with multiple outlets including the Qatar-funded Al Jazeera, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on the Nuseirat camp in Gaza City, on December 15, 2024, according to Al Jazeera and multiple news reports.
The Al Jazeera Media Network said in a statement that Al-Louh was covering the Palestinian civil defense forces’ rescue operations of a family severely injured in an earlier Israeli strike. Four Palestinian civil defense workers were also killed, according to those reports.
The Al Jazeera statement described the killing of Al-Louh as a targeted attack, saying it took place days after an Israeli strike destroyed his house in the Da’wa neighborhood of Nuseirat camp, in which it was utterly destroyed.”
Al-Louh was the sixth Al Jazeera-affiliated journalist killed since the start of the Israel-Gaza war on October 7, 2023. He died on the first anniversary of the killing of Al Jazeera camera operator Samer Abu Daqqa, who died after sustaining injuries in an Israeli attack on southern Gaza.
The Israel Defense Forces said that it had targeted the civil defense offices in a “precise strike,” because it was being used as a “command-and-control center” by Hamas and Islamic Jihad to plan an “imminent terror attack against IDF troops.” The IDF’s spokesperson for Arabic media, Avichay Adraee, described Al-Louh as a “terrorist in the Islamic Jihad who also worked as a photographer for Al Jazeera” in a post on social media platform X. The IDF did not provide any proof for their allegations.
CPJ has previously denounced the IDF’s smearing of Palestinian journalists with terrorist labels.
CPJ did not receive an immediate response to its email to the IDF’s North America Media Desk asking whether the IDF knew there were journalists and other civilians in the areas that it bombed, if the journalists were targeted for their work, and whether the military had any evidence that Al-Louh was a militant.