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Al Jazeera reporter Samer Abudaqa has been buried in southern Gaza, and many mourners, including journalists, are paying their respects to the cameraman who was killed in an Israeli attack.

The funeral took place on Saturday in the city of Khan Younis. Abudaqa’s relatives, friends and colleagues bid a tearful farewell as his body was lowered into the ground.

Abudaqa, a cameraman for Al Jazeera Arabic in Gaza, was hit by an Israeli airstrike while reporting from Farhana’s school in Khan Younis. His friend, Al Jazeera Arab journalist Wael Dahdouh, who lost his wife, son, daughter and granddaughter in a bombing in ancient Israel, was injured.

Journalists in Gaza are carrying a “humane and dignified message” to the world amid the ongoing war and will continue to work despite Israel’s attacks, Dahdouh said in a statement.

“We will continue to do our work professionally and transparently,” he said, as mourners around him wept.

On Friday, Dahdouh was hit by shrapnel on his upper arm, and was able to walk alone to Nasser Hospital, where he was treated for minor injuries. He said that the network’s staff accompanied security rescuers on a mission to evacuate a family after their house was bombed.

“We caught the destruction and reached a place that has not been covered by a camera lens since the Israeli ground operation began,” said Dahdouh from his hospital bed.

As the Al Jazeera journalists were returning to the ground because the areas were not accessible by car, Dahdouh said “something big” happened that knocked him down.

After the explosion, Mr. Dahdouh said he clutched his wounds and left the area to get help, but when he arrived at the ambulance, medics said he could not return to the scene because it was too dangerous.

Efforts to find a safe route to send rescuers to Abudaqa were delayed, Dahdouh said, adding that one ambulance that tried to reach the cameraman caught fire.

“We got into the ambulance, I asked them to go back to where I was because Samer was still there and he was screaming and asking for help,” Dahdouh said before hearing the news of Abudaqa’s murder.

“He was injured in the lower part of his body but the doctors told me that we have to leave as soon as possible and they will send us another ambulance so that we don’t have to suffer.”

On Friday, Al Jazeera Media Network condemned the attack and offered its condolences to Abudaqa’s family in Gaza and Belgium.

It said in a statement that it “makes Israel directly responsible for the killing of Al Jazeera journalists and their families”.

“During today’s bombing in Khan Younis, Israeli drones fired missiles at a school where civilians had fled, causing indiscriminate casualties,” the network said.

“Following Samer’s injuries, he was left to die for more than 5 hours, as Israeli forces prevented ambulances and rescue workers from reaching him, denying him the emergency treatment he needed,” he said.

‘There is nothing to protect journalists’

The two journalists have worked together with Al Jazeera Arabic since before the war.

“(Samer) and Wael form a very professional team, strong on the ground, writing everything and bringing all the facts and pictures that the Palestinian people have been facing,” Al Jazeera reporter Hani Mahmoud said.

“But especially with this war, because of its scale and scope and the amount of destruction, they have been at the forefront of explaining everything that one would have forgotten,” he added.

Mahmoud said on Saturday that “there is nothing to protect journalists crossing the Gaza Strip”, with an increasing number of targets directly or through their families “just hurting them so much that it prevents them from continuing”.

“This is a terrible crime – direct targeting,” said Ibrahim Qanan, a reporter for the pan-Arab network al-Ghad. “The first bullet hit Samer and he tried to crawl for 200 meters, but the Israeli warplanes hit him directly, so he died and his body was cut into pieces.

“This is a crime, day and night, against journalists and journalists who are working to expose Israel’s crimes in the Gaza Strip.”

Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan, reporting from Ramallah in the populated West Bank, said he and several of his colleagues checked their phones first thing in the morning after waking up to see if any of their colleagues on the ground were still alive.

“This is the message that I have taken away from all our friends in Gaza: They wake up every morning with the desire to continue reporting,” he said. “I’m happy about it.”

Al Jazeera journalists were targeted

Abudaqa and Dahdouh are not the first Al Jazeera journalists to be attacked while reporting.

The first was Palestinian journalist Tarek Ayoub, who was killed in 2003 as a result of injuries sustained by a US bomb on Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Baghdad, during the Iraq war.

Other Al Jazeera journalists have also been killed in Libya, Syria and Yemen. The network has installed a monument at its headquarters in Doha: a metal tree sculpture with pages bearing the names of journalists.

“There is no way around bullets, there is no way around bombs,” Al Jazeera’s Mahmoud said.

“But some things must be written. The story of Gaza and its people needs to be told to the whole world, and that is perhaps the greatest motivation for the media community in Gaza, despite the fact that their lives are in danger.

Abudaqa joined Al Jazeera in June 2004, working as a cameraman and editor.

The journalist, who was born in 1978, was the father of three boys and a girl. He was a resident of the city of Abasan al-Kabira near Khan Younis.

Abudaqa is the 13th Al Jazeera journalist killed in the line of duty since the network’s inception in 1996.

Call for response

On Friday, the spokesman for the security of the White House, John Kirby, expressed Washington’s “deep regret and sorrow” for the killing of Abudaqa, as the international community wants to be held accountable, because of the Israeli killing of journalists since October 7, growing.

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian representative to the United Nations, said “enough is enough” after the killing of Abudaqa.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said it was “deeply regrettable” and called for an independent investigation into the attacks.

A press freedom group has described the conflict in Gaza as the most dangerous for journalists it has ever documented.

“We are outraged by the high price, I would say a very high price, that Palestinian journalists are paying,” CPJ’s Carlos Martinez de la Serna told Al Jazeera, adding that “there is a clear sense of impunity.”

“We need an international, independent investigation to look into all these murders and those who participated must be held accountable,” said de la Serna. “It is important to remember that journalists who are subject to international humanitarian law are civilians, and the responsibility of all those involved in this war is to protect them, and what we are seeing is that journalists are being killed.”

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said it was “shocked” by the attack, writing on X.

An IFJ report published last week found that 72 percent of journalists who died on the job this year were killed in the Gaza conflict.

“We condemn this attack and reiterate our demand that the lives of journalists be protected,” the group added.