TEHRAN – Israel killed Palestinian photojournalist Mahmoud Wadi with a precise drone strike in Khan Younis, Gaza, on December 2, 2025.

Wadi, the owner of Alquds Studio, died instantly while filming in a street well inside Palestinian-controlled territory.

Another journalist, Muhammad Abdel Fattah Aslih—whose brother Hassan had been killed in an earlier drone attack on Nasser Hospital’s emergency ward—was wounded in the same attack.

Wadi’s final footage would have shown a Gaza still bleeding two months into a supposed ceasefire. Instead, the drone that killed him ensured those images never reached the world.

After Israeli strikes destroyed his studio in April 2025, its Facebook page went silent for more than a year. It returned in December 2025 with a single post, capturing a wedding “despite all the difficult conditions and the war.”

Soon after, it abandoned celebrations entirely, turning instead to drone footage of hunger and endless rubble.

His drone shots juxtaposed memories of intact neighborhoods against the reality Israel left behind. That act of bearing witness made him a target.

The October 10, 2025, truce, brokered with American involvement, was supposedly meant to halt the carnage.

It has not. Gaza authorities and monitoring groups have documented more than 590 violations in the first seven weeks alone, including artillery fire, tank incursions, and airstrikes that have killed at least 357 Palestinians since the agreement. Among the dead: at least twenty journalists, Mahmoud Wadi being the latest.

Since Israel’s military campaign began in October 2023, the toll on Gaza’s media community has been apocalyptic. Palestinian journalist unions report 274 killed, while the United Nations cites more than 260—the highest number of journalists killed in any single conflict in modern history.

The pattern is unmistakable: reporters wearing press vests struck while embedded with rescue teams; media offices flattened; entire families of journalists wiped out in overnight bombings; displacement tents hit while reporters slept beside the civilians they served.

Israel continues to bar foreign correspondents from entering Gaza independently, making local journalists the world’s only eyes on the ground. Killing them is the most effective way to blind international scrutiny.

The ceasefire was never extended to Gaza’s storytellers. Tanks still push past the arbitrary “yellow lines” Israel drew across the Strip. Drones still hunt. And journalists—those stubborn, essential witnesses—keep dying.

Wadi’s life and death crystallize what Gaza’s press corps has endured: ordinary people turned into essential witnesses, then systematically removed. That deliberate erasure amounts to a war on testimony and truth.