(Washington, D.C., 8/25/2025) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), America’s umbrella group of Muslim associations, along with the American Muslim community, strongly condemns the deliberate Israeli war crime of double-bombing Nasser Hospital complex in Khan Younis to kill patients, medical workers, and journalists.
The outlawed “double-tap” strike killed 21, including five Palestinian journalists, while injuring 50, among them “critically ill patients receiving care,” according to WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus who said one strike bombed the building housing the emergency room, surgical unit, and inpatient ward.
The murdered journalists – some on live video feed – were all covering the catastrophic flood of patients into Nasser Hospital from the Israeli mass killing and injury incidents of at least 61 Palestinians that day in Gaza.
The deliberately targeted journalists, almost all in their 20s, included Al Jazeera cameraman Mohammad Salama; Reuters photojournalist Hussam al-Masri; Associated Press & The Independent Arabic reporter Mariam Abu Daqqa, Quds Feed Network & Middle East Eye reporter Ahmed Abu Aziz, and journalist Moaz Abu Taha, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office.
In a separate Gaza media assassination, Israeli soldiers targeted and killed a sixth Gaza journalist and academic, Hassan Douhan, a correspondent for Al-Hayat al-Jadida publication. The assassination came shortly after Dohan posted a tribute to his five fellow journalists assassinated earlier in the Nasser Hospital bombing on Facebook.
The Israeli forces killed the Gaza journalists at Nasser Hospital yesterday using the internationally illegal “double tap” strike tactic pioneered by the U.S. in its infamously immoral “war on terror,” according to Jeremy Scahill, cofounder of Drop Site News.
He said that “Israel is trying to systematically murder the witnesses to its genocidal actions, to the burning of children alive in tents, to the forced starvation of people and massive bombing of whole cities, razing them to the ground.”
An initial drone strike hits a target, intending to draw first responders, rescue workers, medical personnel, and journalists to the site. Then a second strike kills those who come to aid the bombing victims and to report on it to the world.
The assassinations raise the appalling number of intentional Israeli killings of Palestinian journalists and media workers since October 7, 2023, to a shocking 275 press murders and 281, including non-Palestinian reporters.
The Israelis have murdered far more journalists in Palestine in just 23 months than the combined number of all media killings in every major war since the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s. That means the Israelis have killed more Palestinian journalists in their current Gaza genocide than all the journalists of every nationality killed in both World Wars One and Two, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Ukraine added together.
USCMO Secretary General Oussama Jammal said today in a statement:
“These Palestinian journalists are the heroes of our time, the unparalleled of their profession, the undisputed martyrs for truth of the age.
“These Palestinian reporters, most of them so young, alone hold aloft the very beacon of the journalistic ideal of truth in our dark world. They insist on carrying out their duties of reporting, of being the eyes and ears of humanity, on the frontline of the most egregious genocide of our age.
They persevere in the face of constant threat of assassination, while utterly and continuously traumatized, while being starved to death, with throats parched from lack of water, and while pushed far beyond the limits of human exhaustion.
“Think of their unheralded yet incomparable sacrifice. The Israelis have exterminated most of their family members. Many of these family members the Israelis slaughtered in direct retaliation for these Palestinian journalists’ own dauntless reporting.
“They continue to file their harrowing stories as war correspondents for a world that has abandoned them, left them totally unprotected. Yet still they insist on rushing into the maelstrom of death and destruction to tell the world their story of the Palestinian holocaust, so that history and the human heart will record it.
“This is very much a holocaust, mind you, one that we as Americans can no longer ignore. It is a genocide that President Trump and the Republicans (like President Biden and many Democrats before him) are knowingly, willingly, and actively co-authoring with the U.S.’s rogue Israeli client state, let loose to run amok in the bipartisan mass annihilation they are together writing in the blood of Palestine’s children.
“That blood has now forever stained Trump’s hands, just as it indelibly marks the palms of all the complicit political leadership – and they have spattered it all over the humiliated face of the American people.
“Does Trump dare dream of a Nobel Peace Prize while he is personally, materially, and politically participating in the war crime of the century against innocent humanity?
“Is his unleashing of the U.S.’s Israeli attack jackals of war on millions of besieged, blockaded, and barricaded people in a death camp worse than any the world has seen in modern history – whole cities obliterated, all life-sustaining infrastructure destroyed, Gaza reduced to an endless strip of more than 42 million tons of unlivable, dystopian rubble with perhaps hundreds of thousands of rotting bodies beneath it – is that the stuff of a Nobel Peace Prize?
“Is Trump’s weak, detached Israel-sycophancy – outsourcing U.S. Middle East policy to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while authorizing and abetting the literal starvation, dehydration, and emaciation of a million children, wasting away and dying before our very eyes – a demonstration of the kind of character and leadership deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize?
“Does Trump hope for a Nobel Peace Prize while he is overseeing the crime of crimes, this wanton genocide and ethnic cleansing of the oppressed and vulnerable indigenous people of the land of the prophets?
“At this late stage of our American genocide in Gaza, Trump and the U.S. policy makers have only one way to redemption: impose a permanent ceasefire on the Israelis, surge massive aid into Gaza, herd Israeli troops out of Gaza and all Palestine’s illegal settlements, recognize and guarantee a free, UN-compliant sovereign Palestine, and organize an all-world rebuild of Gaza. That is the minimum diplomatic penance required.
“May we find the heart and soul to do at least this.”
Our prayers of condolences once again go out to any remaining family and loved ones of these martyred witnesses to the truth of our time.
We pray God accepts them into the Hereafter amid gardens and flowing rivers among all the noble bearers of truthful witness and that He joins them with their countless family members and loved ones martyred before them.
We pray that God shower them with blessings, enrobe them in His mercy, purify them with His grace, immortalize their sacrifice, and admit them into the Chambers of His Highest Garden of Paradise.
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