The 33-year-old journalist, who worked for Independent Arabia and the Associated Press (AP), was among roughly 22 people killed, including five journalists and five first responders and medics, in two separate Israeli strikes on the hospital complex minutes apart, on a facility that is supposed to be protected under the Geneva Conventions.
The investigation, based on dozens of witness testimonies, whistleblower accounts, and visual analysis, provides the most detailed reconstruction yet of the attack and the final minutes of those who perished.
The INDEPENDENT concluded that the evidence suggests that the Israeli attack "may constitute another war crime" against the Palestinian people under international law.
The report by the UK-based paper comes as Israel forges ahead with its genocidal war in Gaza, now nearing the completion of its third year, in the face of mounting international condemnation.
It also follows Israel’s killing of several Gaza journalists despite the October 2025 Israel-Hamas ceasefire. Israeli occupation forces have also killed journalists in southern Lebanon since October 2023, including at least 20 journalists and media workers killed since Israel reignited its war on Lebanon in March this year.
A morning like any other
On the morning of the strike, Mariam was sitting in the partially destroyed building she shared with other female reporters in Khan Younis, just across the street from Nasser Hospital. Israeli occupation bulldozers had earlier punched through the side of the wall, which the owners had patched up with rubble, cement and rocks. The room was, in the words of her friend Baraa Lafi, “crushed and deformed.” But it was home—for now.
She was with Baraa, her close friend and flatmate, discussing their latest joint report about overcrowding at the hospital. The two women had interviewed their friend, Canadian-Palestinian emergency nurse Amanda Nasser, who was volunteering with the Canadian medical charity GLIA.
Mariam had been struggling emotionally in recent weeks. She deeply missed her only child, 14-year-old Ghaith, whom she had managed to send to the UAE last year. She was still grieving the loss of her mother, who died of cancer in May 2024, in part due to a lack of treatment in the besieged territory. Her father, to whom she had donated one of her kidneys before the war, was also unwell. The family had, like so many in Gaza, lost their home in Khan Younis, been forcibly displaced multiple times and survived starvation.
Surrounded by death, she had secretly left a will for her son with Baraa. Three days earlier, she had sent a voice note to her editor at Independent Arabia, warning that she might be forced to flee for the fourth time. Hospital staff had told journalists that Nasser and the surrounding area would be next, following a well-worn pattern of Israel striking, encircling and laying siege to hospitals.
"I hope you are still tracking me, right?" she said in the voice note, breaking off into deep, chest-wracking coughs. "I don't know where to go. I have nowhere to go."
Suspicious orders
Inside the hospital, international medics had been told the night before that they must attend mandatory World Health Organization (WHO) training about gender-based violence (GBV), off campus. Amanda Nasser was frustrated she had to leave her work to get in a convoy, noting the stifling wards, thick with the smell of death and decay, were over capacity.
"Usually we can get [training] through some sort of lesson we can do remotely online," she recalled. "GBV is a problem happening as well. But obviously we're in the middle of a genocide."
Another international GLIA volunteer, anaesthetist Dr Travis Melin, was equally bemused. Today was his last day in Gaza, and he questioned why he would need to do this training now.
"They usually plan things in advance. What felt funny to us was that all of a sudden, they said, 'Hey, there's mandatory training now,'" he remembered.
Outside, the hospital's courtyard—now a bustling tent city—was waking up in the blistering heat of the summer morning. Civilians who had fled their flattened homes across the 40-kilometre-long enclave had set up camp in the grounds of the complex. An ecosystem had sprung up: people sold what meagre supplies were available by the main gate. The biggest tent within the courtyard, topped with bright blue tarpaulin, stretched alongside the eastern side of the compound and was reserved for the journalists, also displaced, who effectively lived there too.
Israel’s first strike
At approximately 10:09 a.m., Hussam al-Masri, a 49-year-old Reuters cameraman and father of four, was standing next to his camera on the eastern external concrete of the hospital stairwell, a known hangout spot for reporters to do live stand-ups, have a cigarette or get mobile phone signal during frequent power blackouts.
He had just been on the phone with his wife, Samaher, who was fighting ovarian cancer in the besieged territory where there is no treatment. Hussam sounded tired and worn out. Recently, Samaher had been worried her husband was becoming too morbid.
"I just want to rest. I want to be martyred so I can finally rest," he told her again in despair.
Their conversation was cut short. A massive explosion erupted, and the line went dead.
Ghad TV correspondent Ibrahim Qannan, standing by the eastern entrance to the complex preparing to go live, heard two deafening blasts rip open the skies.
One projectile crashed into the northern side of the hospital, tearing through what had been nicknamed "the Titanic": a communal area, flanked by large windows, near the operating room, where medics rest between surgeries. The second smashed through the eastern external stairwell on the fourth floor.
Through his viewfinder, Ibrahim could see a metre-wide hole clawed out of the stairwell exactly where his friend Hussam had been standing moments before. In his place was a cloud of ash and dust.
Ibrahim immediately messaged the Ghad TV main studio in Cairo. "The hospital is being bombed," he repeated in shock.
In the chaos that followed, journalists, medics and first responders, including Mariam, who was, as usual, one of the first on the scene, converged on the stairwell to help and to report, gathering en masse over the next several minutes.
Israel’s second strike and its consequences
Two deafening explosions—so close together they meld into a single deadly heartbeat—crack open the sky, the air, sound and light itself at precisely 10:17 a.m.
It was now seven to eight minutes after the first blast: just long enough for medics, first responders and journalists to gather en masse at the site. Ibrahim's live stream was engulfed in a fist of dust, concrete, splintered metal and wood. In shock, he screamed incomplete sentences live on air: "Oh God. The civil defence, gone. They killed people. Civil defence, gone."
Jamal Badah, a Palestine TV cameraman who had rushed to help after the first strike, came to but could not hear or see anything for thirty seconds. When he could finally open his eyes, he saw Mariam lying motionless at his feet. Mohamed Salama had been struck on the back of the head and was vomiting. Ahmed Abu Aziz was bleeding out nearby. Moaz Abu Taha had lost half his head.
Mariam was later found in the hospital's emergency department by Ibrahim Qannan, who identified her body under a hospital sheet.
She was one of five journalists killed in the two strikes. Alongside Hussam al-Masri, the dead included Mohamed Salama, a cameraman for Al Jazeera; Ahmed Abu Aziz, a stringer for Middle East Eye; and Moaz Abu Taha, a freelance videographer. Five first responders and medics also died, among them civil defence worker Imad Al-Shaer, whose body was later found hanging from the fourth-floor ledge where he had been working.
The INDEPENDENT investigation also revealed that Mariam appeared in Israeli surveillance footage taken four days before the strike. Screenshots obtained by The paper show her, head bent, hunched over her phone, sitting next to a tripod and camera on the stairwell.
Reuters confirmed the camera was their live feed of Khan Younis and that the Israeli military knew they had teams working in Nasser Hospital. In the days before the strike, the feed had been capturing footage of Israeli military bulldozers demolishing parts of southern Gaza.
The forensic case
The INDEPENDENT investigation draws on more than witness testimony. Video analysis shows the two projectiles of the second strike hitting too close together to have come from a single tank round, pointing to coordination.
Acoustic investigators at the non-governmental organization (NGO) Earshot triangulated footage from at least five cameras and concluded the shells were likely 120 millimetre M329 rounds made by Elbit Systems, one apparently set to anti-personnel mode with submunitions designed to maximise casualties, fired from a tank position roughly 2.5 kilometres northeast of the hospital, corroborated by satellite imagery showing a tank base at that location. Independent weapons experts who examined shrapnel photographed at the scene reached the same conclusion.
Two Israeli military whistleblowers who served in south Gaza told The Independent the attack pattern was deliberate—striking a hospital would have required sign-off from battalion level or higher, and the specific method, a second strike roughly ten minutes after the first, meant, in one whistleblower's words, "they definitely saw the crowd." He added that it is standard practice to inflict maximum casualties. “One shell is supposed to break the shelter, the second one kills the people,” he said.
The United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who is investigating attacks on Palestinian journalists, said the Nasser Hospital strikes fit a broader pattern "that suggests a clear intention to silence Palestinian journalists in all possible ways," adding that her ongoing inquiry "strongly suggests that journalists have been intentionally targeted so that they will not report on the crimes committed against the Palestinians."
The investigation concludes that Mariam Abu Dagga, Hussam al-Masri, and others killed in the strikes were victims of an attack that demands further scrutiny and accountability under international law.
Not the first, not the last
Since the outbreak of Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip in October 2023, the occupation army has killed at least 247 Palestinian journalists, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
The Israeli attack on Nasser Hospital was one of the deadliest single incidents for the press since October 2023. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said that Israel killed more than 200 Palestinian media workers since 2023, more journalists than any other government since the CPJ began collecting data in 1992.
The organization previously said the Israeli occupation army launched smear campaigns branding journalists as "militants", in an attempt to "manufacture consent to kill them."
Israel has made Gaza the deadliest place for journalists in modern records.
By the end of 2025, the CPJ had documented 129 journalists and media workers killed worldwide that year alone, with Israeli occupation forces responsible for 86 of those deaths, the vast majority of them Palestinian journalists in Gaza. Israel was also responsible for 81 percent of the killings CPJ classified as intentional.
The scale of the killings has been compounded by Israel’s banning of all foreign journalists from Gaza in an attempt to prevent the international community from reading or watching about its crimes in the strip.
This has left Palestinian reporters with the double burden of documenting the Israeli crimes, while living through the horror themselves.
The Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) stated that the unprecedented toll in Gaza makes accountability reporting increasingly difficult, as the very journalists who could document Israeli transgressions are being killed, leaving fewer witnesses to tell the story of what happened to those who came before them.
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