Footage recovered from the drone of an Al Jazeera team killed by the IDF in a targeted Jan. 7 missile strike raises critical questions about the Israeli justification for the attack.
Drone footage shot by Mustafa Thuraya less than an hour before he and fellow journalist Hamza Dahdouh were killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike. JERUSALEM — On Jan. 7, the Israeli military conducted a targeted missile strike on a car carrying four Palestinian journalists outside Khan Younis, in southern Gaza.They were returning from the scene of an earlier Israeli strike on a building, where they had used a drone to capture the aftermath.
Interviews with 14 witnesses to the attack and colleagues of the slain reporters offer the most detailed account yet of the deadly incident. The Post found no indications that either man was operating as anything other than a journalist that day. Both passed through Israeli checkpoints on their way to the south early in the war; Dahdouh had recently been approved to leave Gaza, a rare privilege unlikely to have been granted to a known militant.
“It should be incumbent on the IDF to investigate what happened” on Jan. 7, Irene Khan, the U.N. special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, told The Post in February. Wael came off air on Oct. 28 to learn that his wife, son Mahmoud and daughter Sham — Hamza’s siblings — and a grandson had beenHamza joined Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau during the conflict, working as an assistant cameraman and a field producer, his father said.
On Jan. 6, the eve of their deaths, Dahdouh and Thuraya shared a meal with colleagues. “It was a simple dinner, but full of warmth,” said Adli Abu Taha, 33, a cameraman for Al-Kufiya TV.The journalists awoke on Jan. 7 to news of an airstrike on the home of the Abu al-Naja family, south of Khan Younis, according to a photographer for the Palestine Today television channel, Amer Abu Amr, who was also at the scene that day.
He zooms out twice, briefly, showing the landscape to the northwest and southwest of the damaged building, about a mile in each direction. No Israeli troops, aircraft or other military equipment are visible in the footage.At The Post’s request, two analysts reviewed available satellite imagery of the area taken by Planet Labs and Airbus on Jan. 7, covering a radius of roughly 1.2 miles from where the drone was launched.
Thuraya, Dahdouh, Qahwaji, Rajab and their driver, 26-year-old Qusay Salem, who were not injured by the second strike, also fled the scene. Minutes later, an IDF video shows the sights of a military drone lock on to their vehicle, traveling just behind the ambulance. The sound of the explosion is captured in Amr’s recording from the back window of the ambulance at approximately 11:10 a.m.Other eyewitness videos show the grisly aftermath: Thuraya and Salem were torn apart by the strike.
Suliman Hijji, a videographer working in the Rafah area, decided at the war’s outset he would keep his drone grounded.A freelance journalist in Gaza who has worked for international outlets, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of safety concerns, said he had received a “general warning” from an Israel officer: “The officer told me not to be exposed to danger, and not to operate drones.”
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