In yet another atrocity added to the growing list of massacres in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian journalist Hassan Samour was killed along with his entire family in an Israeli airstrike that targeted their home in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, in the early hours of Thursday.
The strike left no survivors. Twelve members of the Samour family, including women and children, were wiped out from the civil registry in an instant—a tragic scene that epitomises the relentless brutality of an aggression that continues to crush all aspects of life in the besieged territory.
Samour carried no weapon—only a camera, a voice, and a deep commitment to telling the story of his people. That alone was enough to place him on a list of targets.
His killing brings the total number of journalists killed since the beginning of the genocidal war on Gaza to 216, reflecting what appears to be a systematic policy to silence voices and suppress the truth. In Gaza, the camera is now treated like a weapon, and the journalist’s voice as a threat to be extinguished—part of a disturbing pattern that has turned journalism into a daily act of risking one’s life.
Overnight and into Thursday morning, Israel intensified its aerial bombardment across several areas of Gaza, focusing especially on Khan Younis, where homes and tents sheltering displaced families were bombed, resulting in the death of 82 Palestinians.
What is unfolding in Gaza amounts to a systematic genocide, targeting the civilian population in direct violation of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The repeated pattern of targeting families, flattening entire neighbourhoods, bombing hospitals and infrastructure, and blocking humanitarian aid reveals a clear policy aimed at collective destruction of the Palestinian population—whether through killing, displacement, or forced starvation.
Within this context, the killing of journalist Hassan Samour and his entire family is not an isolated tragedy, but part of a broader campaign of extermination. Journalists in Gaza are no longer collateral victims—they are deliberate targets, as part of a strategy to silence the Palestinian narrative and obstruct the documentation of war crimes.
