Gaza City: Hundreds of mourners attended a funeral today for a Palestinian cameraman from the Reuters news service who was killed by an Israeli tank shell in the Gaza Strip.

Mourners carried the body of Fadel Shana, 23,draped in a Palestinian flag, from Gaza City's Al-Shifa hospital to a nearby cemetery. Alongside the body others held aloft a stretcher bearing his broken camera.

Shana was killed yesterday by a shell fired from an Israeli tank he was filming from several hundred metres away during a military incursion into Gaza that killed 17 other Palestinians, Reuters said.

He had been standing next to a jeep clearly marked with "TV" and "Press" stickers, Reuters said.

A videotape found in the camera shows a wide shot with the tank on the horizon seconds before it fired the shell that killed Shana. Another three passersby were killed, including two teenage boys on a bicycle.

An Israeli military spokesman expressed regret after the incident.

"We regret the death of a photographer, but it must be pointed out that there is a war going on against armed terrorists who are extremists and dangerous," he told AFP.

At the funeral, mourners carried a large portrait of Fadel and banners in Arabic and English reading "No to the assassination of journalists," and "The assassination of Fadel is a stigma on the face of the Israeli occupation."

Senior officials from both the Islamist Hamas movement, which has ruled Gaza since June, and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah party, which was routed in the Hamas takeover, marched in the funeral procession. 
Source : PTI