The Agence France-Presse office in Gaza City, which is being subjected to relentless Israeli bombardment, was severely damaged after an extended bombing, according to what an employee cooperating with the agency said today (Friday).

According to her, Agence France-Presse is the only international agency that broadcasts directly from Gaza City without stopping.

The agency's collaborator, who inspected the place on Friday morning, said that an explosive shell appeared to have penetrated the room of the technical employee in the Gaza office from east to west on the last floor of the 11-story building, destroying a wall in the room and causing severe damage to two adjacent rooms.

The blast also damaged the doors of other rooms on the floor and hit water tanks on the roof of the building.

In response to a question from the agency, an Israeli army spokesman said that its services “verified the information several times. The army did not carry out a strike on this building.”

The Chairman of the Agency’s Board of Directors, Fabrice Ferris, condemned “the bombing of the office, whose geographical location is known to everyone,” adding that “the repercussions of this strike could have been disastrous if the Agency’s team had not been evacuated from the city.”

A 24-hour live broadcast from the agency's camera from Gaza City showed that the strike occurred Thursday, a few minutes before noon local time (10:00 GMT).

Pictures taken on Friday of the exterior facade of the building, which houses the agency’s offices on the last two floors in the western Rimal neighborhood in Gaza City, near the port, showed a large gap at the level of the agency’s office.

No one from the eight-person Agence France-Presse team in Gaza was present in the office at the time of the bombing.

The agency's journalists moved from Gaza City to the south of the Strip on October 13, after the Israeli warning to civilians to evacuate the northern area, where Israel carries out extensive military operations and considers it the center of Hamas' operations.

In May 2021, during the previous war between Hamas and Israel, the Israeli army bombed a 13-story tower that housed the offices of the Qatari Al Jazeera channel and the American Associated Press news agency. Israel said at the time that it had intelligence information that made bombing the building “legitimate.”

Media coverage from the Gaza Strip is very difficult, due to the danger of movement on the ground, and due to interruptions in communications and the Internet.