RESOLVING THE LEDGER
This is one outlet's own report from The Independent — the article as it was filed. Other outlets are covering the same event; open the full story to compare every source side by side.
See the full story · 1 sourcesMariam Abu Dagga, a mother and journalist, was killed in a 2025 Israeli double-tap attack on the last functioning hospital in South Gaza - she had a way out of Gaza but stayed to cover the slaughter. Chief international correspondent Bel Trew reports
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R eaching into the body bag, and gently cradling her face, a family member places a mobile phone next to Mariam Abu Dagga's ear.
It is a devastating moment. Mariam, a journalist for Independent Arabia , has just been killed in an Israeli double-tap strike on the last functioning hospital in southern Gaza. She is surrounded by mourners in a tableau of grief.
On the phone is her only child, 14-year-old Ghaith. And he is saying goodbye.
He is more than 1,000 miles away, after his mother fought hard for him to be evacuated to safety in the UAE a year earlier.
And so - amid Israel's unprecedented siege and bombardment of Gaza - this is the only way for the distraught young boy to say goodbye.
“Honestly… I was against my son being away from me, because he is quite literally my life itself,” Mariam had said about Ghaith, in tears, during one of the last interviews she gave shortly before she was killed.
“But every day, I was filming the martyrs - children, just children - to the point where one day I imagined Ghaith among them.”
Over a year had passed since he left, she explains in the interview to Palestinian organisation Filastiniyat, struggling to speak.
“He still follows the news… Whenever there were reports of journalists being targeted and I am not online, he would call me. ‘Mum, are you okay? Please tell me you're safe. Reassure me’.
“It gave me the feeling that there was someone… who truly cared about me.”
And now with his worst fears realised, this is the last phone call Ghaith will make to his mother. This time it is to say goodbye, in the hope that somewhere her soul would hear it.
Israel killed 33-year-old Mariam on 25 August 2025, while she was covering the bombing of her colleague, Reuters cameraman Hussam al-Masri. Israel had killed Hussam around eight minutes earlier, while he tended to his camera which was broadcasting the Reuters livestream from Nasser Hospital, a building protected under international law. She had rushed to the scene to find out what had happened.
This meant her killing was live-streamed to the world. A friend of Mariam's, Ghad TV correspondent Ibrahim Qannan, was filming it all from his live position just a few metres away in the aftermath of the first tank projectile which blew up Hussam.
In Ibrahim's footage, you can see Mariam there in a white headscarf and black abaya. Any journalist who covers conflict will instantly recognise that intense concentration: she is entirely focused, intently filming the rescue mission on her mobile. No time to think, to process her own grief or the enormity of the situation around her. In that moment she is her job.
As the crowd of journalists, first responders, medics and civilians grows on the stairwell, there is a second deafening boom, and Mariam is swallowed up in a fury of exploded shrapnel, concrete, wood and dust forever. Killed that day at the same hospital she was born in.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the killings of around 22 people as a "tragic mishap". The Israeli military claimed the target was a camera "positioned by Hamas… to observe the activity of IDF troops" and later identified six people it called Hamas militants. Reuters soon confirmed the camera as their live feed.
A year-long investigation and reconstruction by The Independent , published today, paints a very different story to Israel’s claims, uncovering what international law experts have said is evidence of violations of international law and likely war crimes. The Independent shared these findings with the military who declined to respond to them but added “the review is still ongoing under the General Staff Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism”. In the past the military has in multiple statement to The Independent repeatedly denied targeting journalists or committing any war crimes in Gaza.
Mariam was beloved by those she lived and worked alongside. That is not kindly editorialising, applied posthumously because people can't speak ill of the dead.
Her family, a dozen different journalists and people who lived and worked around Nasser were unanimous in their praise. She was a "blessing", "remarkable", "selfless", "kind", "determined", "dedicated", "a sister among us".
"She was deeply, genuinely human, not just a journalist," says Baraa Lafi, 30, her best friend, flatmate and fellow journalist, also injured in the hospital attack.
"Every story Mariam went to film, she felt the pain of people living it," the Swedish-Palestinian journalist continues, finding it hard to go back to that day.
In the footage of Mariam's body laid out on the ground, Baraa is seen kneeling next to Mariam, her head back, leaning on a wall beside her, lost in an obliterating, incomprehensible grief.
Mariam started working as a photographer in 2016 after graduating with a degree in Journalism and Media Studies. But in her own words, she played with toy cameras as a child and pretended to take photos as if they were real.
She had covered multiple wars and crises: it was around the 2021 conflict in Gaza that she started working with Independent Arabia , alongside the Associated Press and Médecins Sans Frontières.
When Israel unleashed its heaviest ever bombardment of Gaza in the wake of Hamas militants' deadly 7 October 2023 attacks, she decided to stay and keep reporting on Israel’s retaliation, which has been so intense that a UN Commission of Enquiry has concluded it is a genocide. She kept working despite the fact that the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) warned that Gaza was one of the most dangerous places on earth for journalists and that Israel has killed more media workers than any...
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