Al Jazeera Journalist Wael Al-Dahdouh’s Journalist Son Has Now Been Killed By An Israeli Airstrike
Wael al-Dahdouh’s 27-year-old oldest son Hamza was a journalist like his father.
Palestinian journalist Wael Al-Dahdouh, Al Jazeera Arabic’s bureau chief in Gaza, has lost another child after an Israeli airstrike killed his oldest son and fellow journalist Hamza Al-Dahdouh.
27-year-old Hamza was killed on Sunday Jan. 7 along with independent journalist Mustafa Thraya, who also works with AFP and Al Jazeera network, by an Israeli airstrike targeting their car in Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip.
A video shared on social media shows Al-Dahdouh, who had already lost his wife, two of his children, and a granddaughter to an Israeli airstrike at the start of the war, bidding farewell to his son.
“A bit of time, just to hold his hand,” Al-Dahdouh can be seen crying while holding and kissing his dead son’s hand.
“This is our destiny. This is what was chosen for us. This is our life, on this land,” Al-Dahdouh said at Hamza’s burial. ”
This is our choice before Hamza and after Hamza, We remain and continue,” he said. “He wasn’t just a part of me, Hamza was all of me, the soul of my soul, and everything,” Al-Dahdouh said in a statement to Al Jazeera.
Dahdouh was himself injured last month by an Israeli airstrike, which killed his cameraman, Samer Abudaqa, when the two had been reporting in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
109 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since Israel declared war on Gaza on October 7.
Right now, Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
The war in Gaza has become the deadliest period for journalists since 1992, when CPJ began collecting data.
More journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the war than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year, according to CPJ.
More than 22,600 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israeli airstrikes and a ground offensive since Oct. 7, with more than 70% of them being women and children.
