Rasmi Jihad Salem, 30-year-old Palestinian camera operator with Al-Manara TV Production Company, which provides broadcast services to the Iranian Arabic-language channel Al-Alam, was killed on September 2, 2025, in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza City. The strike also wounded three other people.
Hamed El Shobaky, head of Al-Manara’s photography department, said Salem was returning home to check on his family after a work assignment, having heard of escalating hostilities in Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, where they live.
“As he approached his house, a drone fired a missile that struck him directly, killing him instantly,” Shobaky told CPJ.
His cousin, Hamza Sami Salem, told CPJ that the journalist was the main provider for his mother, brother, sister, and their families. His father, a U.S. citizen, had been evacuated during the war through the American embassy.
Salem, the family’s only unmarried son, was also eligible for evacuation, and his father had begun the paperwork. “But Rasmi was killed before the process could be completed,” the relative said.
Ayman Haniyeh, a broadcast engineer also working for Al-Manara, was killed the same day in a separate Israeli strike on Gaza City’s Tel Al-Hawa neighborhood.
The IDF’s North America Media Desk responded to a CPJ email seeking clarification on the September killings of Salem and three other journalists — Islam Abed, Ayman Haniyeh, and Osama Balousha — with a general statement saying it takes “all operationally feasible measures to mitigate harm to civilians including journalists” and that it “never deliberately targets journalists as such.”