Ismail Al Ghoul, a 27-year-old Palestinian journalist working for the Qatar-funded Al Jazeera Arabic TV channel, was killed in an Israeli drone strike with his colleague Rami Al Refee as they were leaving Al Shati refugee camp, near Gaza City, according to Al Jazeera and news reports.
Al Ghoul and Al Refee were reporting on the aftermath of the assassination of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran the night before, and were filming outside his family home in Gaza before they were killed.
When an Israeli strike hit a nearby building, the group of journalists working in the area decided to leave for their safety, Al Jazeera said in its live coverage. Reporting from Al-Ahli Hospital later that day, Al Jazeera’s northern Gaza correspondent Anas Al Sharif said that the journalists left in two vehicles, and Al Ghoul and Al Refee’s car was hit about five minutes later.
Al Araby TV correspondent Islam Badr, who was at the scene, gave a similar account to his outlet, saying that no clashes were taking place in the area.
“It is clear that it was a deliberate targeting because the building next to the place where Ismail and Rami stopped on the street of Ismail Haniyeh’s house was initially hit by a missile from an Israeli drone,” Badr told CPJ from northern Gaza.
“So they left just minutes before 5:00 p.m. and considered the missile attack a warning to evacuate the place. They evacuated it immediately and got into the car quickly … After a distance of between 300 and 500 meters, and within less than five minutes, their car was directly targeted by a drone missile,” Badr said.
CPJ also interviewed freelance photographer Osama Al Ashi, who was the first to arrive at the scene after the strike.
"Ismail and Rami escaped the first targeting at Haniyeh’s house,” he told CPJ. “They rushed [away] in the car, which was marked as ‘TV,’ in addition to them wearing the ‘Press’ vests and helmets, heading to the Baptist Al-Ahli Hospital the center of Gaza City, where they were staying."
Al Ashi said that the second Israeli drone strike hit the journalists’ car on the outskirts of the refugee camp, adding, "I was close to the targeting site, but I knew that they were the targets. I found a child who was martyred [killed] while riding a bicycle, a microphone fallen on the ground near him, and a white car a few meters away. When I came closer, I realized that Ismail and Rami were martyred."
Al Jazeera aired videos of the moments after the strike hit the journalists’ car, which was driven backwards by the impact. It also broadcast footage of Al Ghoul and Al Refee’s bodies being removed from the car.
Their bodies were taken to Al-Ahli Hospital, commonly known as Al-Mamadani, where colleagues said their last goodbyes. Al Jazeera’s Al Sharif said that Al Ghoul’s head was severed from his body.
In a July 31 statement, Al Jazeera described the killing as “part of a systematic targeting campaign against the network’s journalists and their families since October 2023.” It said that “Ismail and Rami were targeted with a missile, resulting in cold-blooded assassination” and pledged to “pursue all legal actions to prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes and stands in unwavering solidarity with all journalists in Gaza.”
On August 1, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed that it had killed Al Ghoul in an airstrike, alleging that he was a member of Hamas’ military wing. “As part of his role in the military wing, Al-Ghoul instructed other operatives on how to record operations and was actively involved in recording and publicizing attacks against IDF troops. His activities in the field were a vital part of Hamas’ military activity,” it said.
Al Jazeera strongly rejected what it called “the baseless allegations made by the Israeli occupation forces in an attempt to justify its deliberate killing” of the two journalists “without providing any proof, documentation or video.”
It said that the IDF’s decision to release Al Ghoul after detaining him for about 12 hours during Israeli forces’ raid on Al-Shifa hospital in March “debunks and refutes their false claim of his affiliation with any organisation.” Al Jazeera said that Al Ghoul joined the network in November 2023, dedicating all his time and effort to covering the war. It called for an independent international investigation into the crimes committed against its journalists and staff.
On August 3, IDF spokesperson Avichay Adraee published a document which he said was found on Hamas computers in Gaza, listing Al Ghoul as an engineer in Hamas’ military wing. It showed that Al Ghoul, born in 1997, received a Hamas military ranking in 2007 — when he would have been 10 years old. The document also indicated that Al Ghoul joined Hamas’ military wing in 2014, at the age of 17.
Al Jazeera questioned the authenticity of the document. It said that the photo of Al Ghoul that the IDF published was of an ID card issued by the Palestinian Authority to all residents and anyone could paste whatever information they wanted on it using basic photo editing software.
Al Ghoul, one of the few reporters remaining in northern Gaza, had more than 620,000 Instagram followers and was well-known for his appearances on Al Jazeera. He was married and the father of a toddler, Zeina, who had not seen him since the war began.
“I know all his movements. Ismail did not even have a lot of time to call his wife and daughter because of the extensive reporting he was doing,” Jihad Al Ghoul, the journalist’s brother, told CPJ via phone, adding that the two men were always in touch, particularly since the rest of the family were displaced to southern Gaza because of the war.
“[Ismail Al Ghoul] had been transmitting news and images of the Israeli strikes on Gaza and the state of famine and disease that had afflicted civilians in the northern Gaza Strip,” he said.
In a January 28 letter responding to CPJ’s request for comment about why Al Ghoul was released after the Al-Shifa raid, the IDF’s North American Media Desk said that Al Ghoul had never been in IDF custody and that "any other claim is false." The IDF repeated its previously published allegations that Al Ghoul was a "Hamas Nukhba terrorist" who had been part of Hamas’ October 7, 2023, raid into Israel.
Al Ghoul was buried in Gaza City on July 31, 2024.