Israel’s military targeted and killed an Al Jazeera correspondent and other four staffers with an airstrike late Sunday in Gaza, after press advocates said an Israeli “smear campaign” stepped up when Anas al-Sharif cried on air over starvation in the territory.

Both Israel and hospital officials in Gaza City confirmed the deaths of al-Sharif and colleagues, which the Committee to Protect Journalists and others described as retribution against those documenting the war in Gaza.

Israel’s military asserted that al-Sharif had led a Hamas cell — an allegation that Al Jazeera and al-Sharif previously dismissed as baseless.

Observers have called this the deadliest conflict for journalists in modern times.

Officials at Shifa Hospital said those killed while sheltering outside Gaza City’s largest hospital complex also included Al Jazeera correspondent Mohamed Qreiqeh.

The strike also killed four other journalists and two other people, hospital administrative director Rami Mohanna told The Associated Press. The strike damaged the entrance to the hospital complex’s emergency building.

Palestinian Journalists Syndicate Secretary Ahed Ferwana called it the "latest massacre" against the media.

The airstrike came less than a year after Israeli army officials first accused al-Sharif and other Al Jazeera journalists of being members of the militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

In a July 24 video, Israel’s army spokesperson Avichay Adraee attacked Al Jazeera and accused al-Sharif of being part of Hamas’ military wing.

Al Jazeera called the strike a “targeted assassination” and accused Israeli officials of incitement, connecting al-Sharif's death to the allegations that both the network and correspondent had denied.

“Anas and his colleagues were among the last remaining voices from within Gaza, providing the world with unfiltered, on-the-ground coverage of the devastating realities endured by its people,” the Qatari network said in a statement.

Apart from rare invitations to observe Israeli military operations, international media have been barred from entering Gaza for the duration of the war. Al Jazeera is among the few outlets still fielding a big team of reporters inside the besieged strip, chronicling daily life amid airstrikes, hunger and the rubble of destroyed neighborhoods.

Al Jazeera is blocked in Israel and soldiers raided its offices in the occupied West Bank last year, ordering them closed.

The network has suffered heavy losses during the war, including 27-year-old correspondent Ismail al-Ghoul and cameraman Rami al-Rifi, killed last summer, and freelancer Hossam Shabat, killed in an Israeli airstrike in March.

Like al-Sharif, Shabat was among the six that Israel accused of being members of militant groups last October.

Al-Sharif’s death comes weeks after a U.N. expert and the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said Israel had targeted him with a smear campaign.

Irene Khan, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, on July 31 said that the killings were “part of a deliberate strategy of Israel to suppress the truth, obstruct the documentation of international crimes and bury any possibility of future accountability.”

The U.N. human rights office on Monday condemned Sunday's airstrike targeting the journalists' tent “in grave breach of international humanitarian law.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists said on Sunday that at least 186 journalists have been killed in Gaza, and Brown University’s Watson Institute in April said the war was “quite simply, the worst ever conflict for reporters.”

In Gaza the Journalists union and Hamas said over 230 journalists have been killed stances since the war erupted.