The last photos taken by Mariam Dagga show the damaged stairwell outside a hospital in the Gaza Strip where she would be killed moments later by an Israeli strike.

Dagga, a visual journalist who freelanced for The Associated Press, was among 22 people, including five reporters, killed Monday when Israeli forces struck Nasser Hospital twice in quick succession, according to health officials.

The photos, retrieved from her camera on Wednesday, show people walking up the staircase after it was damaged in the first strike while others look out the windows of the hospital, the main health facility in southern Gaza.

The military said it targeted what it believed was a Hamas surveillance camera, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement on Monday that Israel “deeply regrets” the attack, calling it a “tragic mishap.”

Dagga, 33, and other reporters regularly based themselves at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis during the war.

She documented the experiences of ordinary Palestinians who had been displaced from their homes, and doctors who treated wounded or malnourished children.

Algeria’s ambassador to the United Nations, his voice breaking and on the verge of tears, read a letter Wednesday to the UN Security Council that Dagga wrote days before she was killed.

It was addressed to her 13-year-old son, Gaith, who left Gaza at the start of the war to live with his father in the United Arab Emirates.

Holding up a photo of Dagga, Amar Bendjama called her “a young and beautiful mother” whose only weapon was a camera.

“Ghaith. You are the heart and soul of your mother,” Bendjama quoted Dagga as writing. “When I die, I want you to pray for me, not to cry for me.”

“I want you never, never to forget me. I did everything to keep you happy and safe and when you grow, when you marry, and when you have a daughter, name her Mariam after me.”

Alongside Dagga, the Israeli strikes killed Reuters cameraman Hussam al-Masri, Al Jazeera contributor Mohammed Salama, and local reporter Moaz Abu Taha, as well as some 20 others, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures cannot be verified and do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

An Israeli military spokesperson said Tuesday that the Reuters and Associated Press journalists killed in the attack were not “a target of the strike.”

“We can confirm that the Reuters and AP journalists were not a target of the strike,” Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani told Reuters.

According to an initial IDF probe of the incident, the troops were targeting a surveillance camera on the hospital grounds that it said was installed by Hamas to track Israeli movements in the area.

The IDF also claimed that six of the more than 20 people killed were terror operatives, including one who took part in the October 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel.

The IDF reiterated that it regrets civilian casualties and does not target journalists, while accusing Hamas of “cynically” exploiting medical facilities for military purposes.

Following the initial investigation’s findings, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir ordered the probe expanded to scrutinize the approval process for the strike, including the timing of the attack, the type of munitions used, and the chain of decision-making on the ground.

Hamas, meanwhile, denied that any of the Palestinians killed in the attack were terror operatives, and said that Israel “attempted to justify this crime by fabricating a false claim that it had targeted a ‘camera’ belonging to resistance elements — an allegation that is baseless, lacking any evidence, and merely aimed at evading legal and moral responsibility for a full-fledged massacre.”

The attack drew widespread international condemnation. The European Union’s diplomatic arm called it “completely unacceptable,” urging Israel to protect civilians and journalists under international law. “There have been too many fatalities in this conflict,” the EU’s External Action Service said.

The Foreign Press Association also condemned the strike, saying the shells “hit the exterior staircase of the hospital where journalists frequently stationed themselves with their cameras,” and that they “came with no warning.”

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said the strikes represented “an open war against free media, with the aim of terrorizing journalists and preventing them from fulfilling their professional duty of exposing its crimes to the world.”

According to the group, more than 240 Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israeli fire in Gaza since the war started on October 7, 2023.

Israel, which says it has no policy of targeting journalists, has asserted that some of the journalists killed throughout the war were in fact combatants. In some cases, the military has provided documentation seized from terror groups in Gaza that list the journalists as fighters.

Hospitals have repeatedly become battlegrounds in the Gaza war, with Israel accusing Hamas of using them to shelter fighters, hold hostages, and conceal military infrastructure.

Hamas has in the past held hostages at Nasser Hospital, according to the IDF and testimony from numerous ex-hostages. Shifa Hospital, in the north of the Strip, was also used by Hamas to hold some hostages and as a command-and-control center early in the war, and was the site of fierce battles between Hamas fighters and IDF troops.