Photo/Illutration Mohammed Mansour, an Asahi Shimbun correspondent, reports from Gaza in October 2024. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

We strongly condemn the inhumanity of the slaying of a journalist who persisted in reporting on the stark reality of a battleground.

This particular journalist also happened to be a young father who was working hard to support his family amid the conflict.

We express our heartfelt condolences.

Mohammed Mansour, 29, who served as an Asahi Shimbun correspondent in Gaza, was killed at home on March 24 in what is believed to have been an Israeli missile attack.

On the same day, a reporter with Middle East satellite broadcaster Al-Jazeera was also killed.

On the suspicion that both were deliberately targeted, the Committee to Protect Journalists, an international nongovernmental organ, has called for an independent international investigation into their deaths.

The Israeli government must comply.

According to authorities in Gaza, more than 200 journalists have died since the start of the conflict between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in October 2023.

Even though the reporters wear bulletproof vests marked “Press” and travel in vehicles, there is no end to the lethal attacks against them.

The Israeli Defense Forces justify the assaults by labelling the victims as “members of terrorist organizations,” but we cannot possibly agree. A special reporter with the United Nations has condemned the Israeli action as “a ploy to silence the critical press, which constitutes a war crime.”

The fierce fighting in Gaza has turned many civilians into collateral damage, and U.N. organs point out that international humanitarian law has been violated. However, the Israeli government refuses to allow foreign media into combat zones.

Journalists living in Gaza, including the late Mansour, are motivated by their sense of crisis that unless they continue reporting what is happening, the rest of the world will not know.

For them, just staying alive is their biggest daily challenge and yet they keep living up to their calling. To stifle their effort is absolutely beyond forgivable.

Israel resumed fighting last week to shatter the less-than-two-months truce in Gaza, where the total number of the dead has now topped 50,000.

Every one of those 50,000 victims had their life and family. When we look at images sent from Gaza, we invariably face the reality of the battleground that we will never be able to see from just that number.

Mansour quoted a Gaza resident as lamenting, “We feel like ‘prisoners’ locked up in a difficult reality.” He also relayed this comment from another citizen when the cease-fire began: “I feel (excited) like a kid on the eve of a big festival.”

Just hours before he was killed, Mansour was warned by a doctor whom he interviewed at a hospital where the injured were being brought in: “The Israeli troops are threatening the people of Gaza, saying there is no such thing as a safe place for them. And that applies to us at the hospital and to you journalists, too.”

We have lost our dear, irreplaceable colleague, but we will never turn our eyes away from Gaza.

We will keep trying our hardest to ensure that the voices of the people of Gaza will continue to be heard, and we will keep calling for the war’s end.

--The Asahi Shimbun, March 26

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