Al Jazeera has accused Israel of the targeted killing of two of its journalists in Gaza as the head of the advocacy group Reporters without Borders decried a “never-ending slaughter” in the territory that had killed 79 journalists in the span of three months. Hamza Dahdouh and Mustafa Thuria were killed while on assignment for Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based media network said in a statement. A third freelancer, Hazem Rajab, was wounded. The health ministry in Gaza confirmed the deaths and blamed an Israeli strike. Dahdouh was the eldest son of Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Gaza, Wael Dahdouh, whose wife, two other children and a grandson were killed by a previous Israeli strike in October. Soon after news broke of his son’s death, Dahdouh, who has been the face of Al Jazeera’s 24-hour coverage of this war, was again live on the air. “The whole world must look at what is happening here in the Gaza Strip,” he said on Al Jazeera. “What is happening is a great injustice to defenceless people, civilian people. It is also unfair for us as journalists.” His determination to continue reporting, even as the war takes a devastating personal toll, has turned him into a symbol of the perils faced by Palestinian journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists on Monday said journalists in Gaza were bearing particularly high risks as they scrambled to report the impact of the war. “Those in Gaza, in particular, have paid, and continue to pay, an unprecedented toll and face exponential threats,” said Sherif Mansour of the organisation in a statement. “Many have lost colleagues, families, and media facilities, and have fled seeking safety when there is no safe haven or exit.” To date, the conflict has claimed the lives of 79 journalists, said Christophe Deloire of Reporters Without Borders. “It is definitely a never-ending slaughter,” Deloire wrote on social media. The United Nations Human Rights Office said on social media that it was “very concerned” by the high death toll of media workers in Gaza and called for the killings of all journalists to be “thoroughly, independently investigated to ensure strict compliance with international law and violations prosecuted.” Witnesses told the AFP news agency that two rockets were fired at a car carrying the reporters – one hit the front of the vehicle and the other hit Hamza, who was sitting next to the driver. Video footage showed a crowd of people looking at the car’s mangled remains, while pools of blood lay on the road. No other damage was visible in the area. The Israeli army told AFP it had “struck a terrorist who operated an aircraft that posed a threat to IDF troops”, adding that it was “aware of the reports that during the strike, two other suspects who were in the same vehicle as the terrorist were also hit”. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who is on his fourth tour of the Middle East since the Hamas attack on southern Israel on 7 October, said he was “deeply, deeply sorry” for Dahdouh’s loss. “I am a parent myself, I can’t begin to imagine the horror that he has experienced, not once, but now twice. This is an unimaginable tragedy and that’s also been the case for far too many innocent Palestinian men, women, children,” he told reporters during a stop in Qatar. Al Jazeera said in a statement it “strongly condemns the Israeli occupation forces’ targeting of the Palestinian journalists’ car” and accused Israel of “targeting” journalists and “violating the principles of freedom of the press”. Earlier in December, a strike killed the father, mother and 20 other family members of another Al Jazeera correspondent, Momen al-Sharafi. On Sunday, crowds of people gathered at the funeral, where a tearful Dahdouh was seen kissing the hand of his dead son. “The world should see with two eyes, not with an Israeli eye. They should see everything happening to the Palestinian people,” Dahdouh said. “What did Hamza do to them [Israelis]? What did my family do to them? What did the civilians do to them? They did nothing to them, but the world closes its eyes to what’s happening in the Gaza Strip,” added Dahdouh, who was wounded in an Israeli strike in December that also killed the Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa. The war in Gaza erupted when Hamas militants stormed across Gaza’s border into Israel in an unprecedented attack that left 1,140 people dead, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures. Israel has vowed to eradicate Hamas, denounced as a terrorist group by the US and EU, and has kept up a relentless bombing of Gaza, killing more than 23,000 people according to health authorities in Gaza. Thousands more are believed to be buried under the rubble while tens of thousands have been wounded. Another journalist who died covering the conflict was Issam Abdallah of Reuters. A Lebanese citizen, he was killed on 13 October by an Israeli tank crew while filming cross-border shelling in Lebanon, according to a Reuters investigation. In May 2022, Shireen Abu Akleh, a veteran Palestinian journalist working for Al Jazeera, was killed while covering an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. The Israeli army later admitted one of its soldiers probably shot the reporter – who was wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest marked “press” – having mistaken her for a militant.