Emad Ghanem, a journalist working for Al-Aqsa TV has had both legs amputated after being fired upon by Israeli soldiers. Video footage of the shooting (below) shows Ghanem being repeatedly shot while lying injured on the ground. He was then rescued by fellow journalists risking their lives to pull him from Israeli gunfire.

Emad Ghanem was covering the story of an escalating Israeli incursion into Gaza which has left 11 Palestinians dead and over 25 injured. Israeli troops and tanks crossed the border early Thursday to fire upon resistance fighters in the eastern part of the refugee camps. Israeli aircraft also attacked the area.

In an attempt to justify deliberate targeting of the press, an Israeli military source said they do not consider a cameraman working for Hamas to be a journalist. In a similar incident around the same incursion, Israeli soldiers fired at a rooftop where several journalists, including a Reuters camera crew, were filming. Fortunately, they failed to injure anyone.

Nour Odeh, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Gaza, said: “Israel has given itself the right to maintain military operations within a certain distance from the border in the Gaza Strip, even two years after it said it completely left the [it]… That’s why the Israeli military considers entry the peripheries of al-Barij refugee camp a routine operation.”

The deaths bring to 5,776 the number of people killed since the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising in September 2000, most of them Palestinians, according to a tally by the AFP news agency.

Israel officially withdrew from Gaza in 2005 after 38 years of occupation, but still continues to conduct armed incursions and air bombings in the territory where it claims rockets are being fired from. During Thursday’s raid, Azmi Abu Dalal, a Palestinian ambulance worker said Israeli soldiers seized him and several colleagues when they tried to evacuate a wounded man from a security post. The soldiers then used the ambulance workers as “human shields” to exit the area. Though it is against Israeli law to use civilians in this manner, the practice is very common. In keeping with the standard practice of dismissing allegations of wrongdoing, an Israeli military spokesman claimed that no such incident had occurred.

source