A Palestinian TV channel affiliated with a militant group said five of its journalists were killed Thursday in an Israeli strike on their vehicle in Gaza, with Israel’s military saying it had targeted a “terrorist cell”.

A missile hit the journalists’ broadcast truck as it was parked in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, according to a statement from their employer, Al-Quds Today.

The channel is affiliated with Islamic Jihad, whose militants have fought alongside Hamas in the Gaza Strip and took part in the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that sparked the war in the Palestinian territory.

The station identified the five staffers as Faisal Abu Al-Qumsan, Ayman Al-Jadi, Ibrahim Al-Sheikh Khalil, Fadi Hassouna, and Mohammed Al-Lada’a.

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They were killed “while performing their journalistic and humanitarian duty”, the statement said.

“We affirm our commitment to continue our resistant media message,” it added.

The Israeli military said in its statement that it had conducted “a precise strike on a vehicle with an Islamic Jihad terrorist cell inside in the area of Nuseirat”.

It added that “before the strike, numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians”.

In a later statement naming the five killed, the military said intelligence had “confirmed that these individuals were Islamic Jihad operatives posing as journalists”.

According to witnesses in Nuseirat, a missile fired by an Israeli aircraft hit the broadcast vehicle, which was parked outside Al-Awda Hospital, setting the vehicle on fire and killing those inside.

The Committee to Protect Journalists’ Middle East arm said the organisation was “devastated by the reports that five journalists and media workers were killed inside their broadcasting vehicle by an Israeli strike”.

“Journalists are civilians and must always be protected,” it added in a statement on social media.

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said last week that more than 190 journalists had been killed and at least 400 injured since the start of the war in Gaza.

It was triggered by the Hamas-led October 7 attack last year, which resulted in 1,208 deaths, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 45,399 people in Gaza, a majority of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the UN considers reliable.

AFP