Israeli ‘smear campaign’ targets journalists, threatens safety, Al Jazeera says

Al Jazeera on Sunday rejected Israeli accusations that one of its journalists, killed in Gaza a day earlier, was a Hamas operative, as family and colleagues mourned the cameraman in the Palestinian territory.The Qatar-based network said in a statement that it “condemns the Israeli occupation army’s baseless accusations, which seek to justify its crimes against Al Jazeera journalists and cameramen in Gaza, most recently the killing of cameraman Ahmed Wishah”.The Israeli military said in a statement issued late on Saturday that Wishah was killed in a “precise strike” alongside two other Hamas militants and that he had served as a “sniper operative” in Hamas.“Alongside his work as an Al Jazeera photojournalist in recent years, Wishah was an operative in Hamas’ military wing,” the military said.When contacted, an Israeli military spokesman provided no evidence to support the accusations against Wishah.Footage captured in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza showed friends and family grieving over Wishah’s lifeless body in the area’s Al-Aqsa Hospital.The cameraman could be seen laid out on a steel tray in the hospital’s morgue with other bodies.