Israel has killed a Palestinian journalist who it claims was “embedded” with Hamas during its rampage through southern Israel in the Oct 7 attacks.

Hassan Eslaiah, a photojournalist and former freelancer for the Associated Press (AP), was wounded in an air strike on a press tent in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis that killed at least two others and left several wounded early on Monday.

The IDF and Israeli intelligence said Eslaiah was operating “under the guise of a journalist and owner of a press company” and that he was actually a member of Hamas’s Khan Younis brigade.

A photo, reported to be from 2018, shows Eslaiah being kissed on the cheek by Yahya Sinwar, who was Hamas’s leader until he was killed by an Israeli tank shell last year.

On October 7 2023, Eslaiah crossed the border into Israel and photographed the ransacking of an Israeli tank and the storming of Kibbutz Nir Oz, where dozens of civilians and troops were killed and several taken hostage.