Palestinian photojournalist Mariam Dagga died in the hospital she had documented

Mariam Abu Dagga, a Palestinian journalist, was killed in an Israeli strike on Gaza’s Nasser Hospital. Photo / Bashar Taleb, AFP

Mariam Abu Dagga, a Palestinian journalist whose photos for the Associated Press and other news outlets captured destruction and misery in Gaza, died in an Israeli strike on Gaza’s Nasser Hospital on Tuesday, with at least 20 other people, including four other journalists, witnesses at the scene and the Gaza Health Ministry said.

Journalists were documenting civil defence workers moving bodies of people who were killed in an initial attack when a second- strike hit.

Dagga’s wire photos from Gaza, including those of the grim conditions in the hospital where she was killed, were published widely across international media, including by the Washington Post.

The Gaza Health Ministry confirmed that 20 Palestinians, including patients, health workers, civil defence, press crews, were killed and several others injured in the attack. Photo / Getty Images

At least 189 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza during the war that began with the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, making it the deadliest conflict to cover in modern times.

Israel has accused some journalists of connections to Hamas, without providing verifiable evidence.

Aside from occasional heavily supervised visits, Israel has blocked outside independent media from access to the Gaza Strip. This has left Palestinian journalists alone to cover the conflict.

A camera with blood on it is seen as injured Palestinians are taken to Nasser Hospital by local residents following Israeli attacks on the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, located in the southern Gaza Strip, on August 25. Photo / Getty Images

Dagga regularly reported from Nasser Hospital to show “one of the only remaining lifelines for people in southern Gaza”, where doctors treated patients with nowhere else to turn, said Sarah El Deeb, an AP colleague.

“Mariam had the skills, the knowledge and the eyes to capture images of mothers, so sick of speaking of how sick their children have become,” she said.

Dagga, who was 33, had worked as a journalist for about a decade, the AP reported. She won an internal award at the AP for her coverage of malnourished children in Gaza.

Dagga took photos and videos that captured hunger in Gaza, bodies of children killed in airstrikes, injured civilians being rushed to receive care, and mourners at funerals.

She was focused on documenting Gaza in a straightforward manner, without attempting to turn her photojournalism into art, said Enric Martí, one of her photo editors at AP.

“I never spoke directly with her,” Martí said. “Yet I felt I understood her way of thinking when she photographed.”

Abby Sewell, an editor at the AP, said in a post on X that Dagga “was a true hero, like all of our Palestinian colleagues in Gaza”.

Dagga always returned from the field with more details than her co-workers were expecting, colleagues said.

“Now, in Khan Younis, we are orphans,” Martí said. “She was our eyes there.”

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