IDF strikes in Gaza said to kill at least 9, including Al Jazeera cameraman

Gaza health officials said Israeli strikes and gunfire on Saturday killed at least 11 people, including an Al Jazeera cameraman whom Israel accused of being a Hamas operative, in the latest violence to rock the coastal territory despite a ceasefire.

Israel and Hamas trade near-daily accusations of truce violations in the Gaza Strip, as progress on permanently ending the war sparked by the terror group’s October 7, 2023, attack remains stalled.

The Hamas-controlled civil defense agency reported six people were killed in separate attacks later Saturday, among them three people in the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, including a local photographer later identified as an employee of Qatar’s Al Jazeera.

“Ahmed Washah, a cameraman for Al Jazeera, has been killed in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a house,” the broadcaster said, while denouncing the attack as a “heinous crime.”

The Israel Defense Forces confirmed targeting Washah, saying he served in Hamas’s military wing as a sniper operative. It said the two others killed alongside him in the Bureij area were also Hamas operatives.

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“Alongside his work as an Al Jazeera photojournalist in recent years, Washah was an operative in Hamas’s military wing. In recent months, he advanced sniper attack plans and additional terrorist activities against IDF troops operating in the Gaza Strip,” the IDF said in a statement.

“Due to his recent military activity and the threat he posed to IDF troops operating in the area, he was eliminated in a precise aerial strike,” the military said.

The IDF said he worked alongside his brother, Mohamed Washah, a “key” Hamas operative who also worked for Al Jazeera. Mohamed Washah was killed in an Israeli strike in April.

Al Jazeera has fiercely denied Israel’s allegations and accused it of systematically targeting Al Jazeera employees in the Gaza Strip.

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Al Jazeera, in a statement, said it “strongly condemns the heinous crime of targeting and killing” the Al Jazeera Mubasher correspondent.

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— Saad Abedine (@SaadAbedine) June 20, 2026

Earlier, the civil defense agency said an overnight Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City killed four members of the al-Safadi family, including the husband, wife and their two daughters, according to

It said the strike also injured 12 others.

The IDF said it struck a terror operative, without elaborating.

Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital confirmed receiving the bodies of four members of the al-Safadi family, including two children.

“Around 2 o’clock, my cousins were asleep when a missile struck them. They have no connection to Hamas, nor are they involved in anything. They’re just innocent children,” said Nael al-Safadi, a relative.

AFP footage from the scene showed an exterior wall of the apartment blown off, exposing rubble, clothes, mattresses and other household belongings strewn across the shattered interior.

“By God, I still feel as though I’m in a dream — I never expected this to happen to us,” Mohammad al-Safadi, who survived the strike, told AFP.

“I’m a civilian. I swear to God I’ve never carried a weapon or fired one. What do you want from me? Go after whoever you’re after, what’s my fault in this?”

Al-Shifa hospital, meanwhile, said it had received one body following a separate Israeli drone strike near an intersection in the north of Gaza City.

In another incident, Israeli forces allegedly shot and killed a woman in Beit Lahiya town further north, according to medics.

Later, an Israeli airstrike killed at least one person and wounded eight others in Khan Younis, south of the enclave.

The IDF did not immediately respond to a request for comment on those reports.

At least 1,012 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire took effect on October 10 last year, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures don’t differentiate between civilians and combatants.

The IDF has reported five deaths in its ranks during the same period.