The last photos taken by Mariam Dagga show the damaged stairwell outside a hospital in the Gaza Strip where she would be killed by an Israeli strike moments later. Dagga, a visual journalist who freelanced for the AP, was among 22 people, including five reporters, killed on 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 main health facility in southern Gaza.
The Israeli military said, without providing evidence, that it had targeted what it believed was a Hamas surveillance camera. Witnesses and health officials said the first strike killed a cameraman from the Reuters news agency doing a live television shot and a second person who wasn't named. A senior Hamas official denied that Hamas was operating a camera at the hospital. 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'd been displaced from their homes, as well as of doctors who treated wounded or malnourished children.
Algeria's ambassador to the United Nations, on the verge of tears and his voice breaking, 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, Ghaith, 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."
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