Issue:
May 2026 | Cover story
Demands for action are growing as Israeli forces continue to kill journalists in Gaza and Lebanon
In October 2024, journalist Fatima Ftouni narrowly escaped death when an Israeli jet bombed her and a group of sleeping reporters in a hotel in southern Lebanon. Ftouni told the Guardian that the blast had shredded her flak jacket. When she dug herself out of the rubble, she found the mangled bodies of two colleagues.
The bombers did not miss the second time. Ftouni died in March this year when an Israeli Defense Force jet struck her car, also killing her brother Mohammed Ftouni. Like her, he worked for Beirut-based al-Mayadeen satellite news channel. Ali Shoeib, of the Hezbollah-owned al-Manar television station, was the third fatal casualty in the vehicle.
Journalists who visited the site after the attack said Ftouni had survived the initial bombing and tried to flee “when another strike targeted her, killing her”. Reports of such "second-tap" killings have become depressingly routine, as have Israel's responses to criticism of them. In this case, Israel accused the occupants of the car of being affiliated with Hezbollah, without providing evidence to support this claim.
Ftouni is one of at least 15 journalists assassinated by Israeli forces in Lebanon since October 2023, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) - in what it calls a “growing pattern of targeted Israeli attacks” in the region. Last month, Amal Khalil and Zeinab Faraj. Khalil, a well-known reporter for the Lebanese daily newspaper Al-Akhbar, had received multiple death threats but continued to work in the region.
In an interview from her hospital bed with the National, an English-language regional newspaper based in Abu Dhabi. Faraj was quoted as follows: “I told (Khalil), ‘I’m next to you.’ She told me, ‘Don’t fall asleep and leave me.’ I said, ‘No, no.’ Then exhaustion took over. I closed my eyes for a moment. Then I heard Amal scream. They struck the room again. Amal was gone.”
Khalil’s killing was condemned by senior figures from across Lebanese politics.
Lebanon's president, Joseph Aoun, said Israel’s “deliberate and consistent targeting of journalists” was “aimed at concealing the truth of its aggressive acts against Lebanon, in addition to constituting crimes against humanity punishable under international laws and conventions”.
Sara Qudah, the regional director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said: “The repeated strikes on the same location, the targeting of an area where journalists were sheltering, and the obstruction of medical and humanitarian access constitute a grave breach of international humanitarian law. CPJ holds Israeli forces responsible for the endangerment of Amal Khalil’s life and the injuries Zeinab Faraj sustained after the targeted strike on their location.”
Laith Marouf, executive director of Free Palestine TV (FPTV), based in central Beirut, says: “Every journalist who was targeted in Lebanon was targeted deliberately, there is no question about that." Journalists working for all three English-language outlets in Lebanon have been killed. “I feel we are next because we are the most visible.”
Marouf says his team has been repeatedly targeted over the last two-and-a-half years. "One time, we were about 20 kilometers from the (Israeli) border and a drone fired a phosphorous shell about 100 meters away from us. Luckily the wind was blowing the other way and the smoke didn’t affect us. A minute later, the Israelis fired a fragmenting missile when they saw us but we were again lucky because we were standing beside a cement wall that took the brunt of the shrapnel. We have been chased by drones multiple times over the last two years.”
Little seems to discourage these killings, even a direct intervention in real time by Aoun, who published a live appeal to save Khalil as she sheltered from Israeli bombs in a building in southern Lebanon. The Red Cross evacuated Faraj but was prevented from saving Khalil by Israeli stun grenades and sniper fire, according to the Lebanese government. When they returned, Khalil was dead.
She was the the ninth journalist killed in Lebanon this year. In March, three journalists were killed in a double-tap attack.
The war on journalists in southern Lebanon is following much the same pattern as Gaza, where at least 235 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed since the Hamas terror attack of October 2023, according to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). Israel has killed more journalists in the Gaza conflict than any other government or entity in a single conflict since the CPJ began collecting records in 1992.
Of the 129 journalists and media workers killed last year, 86 were killed by Israel – the majority of them Palestinians, according to the CPJ.
Israeli responses to the outrage that follows each killing have become so routine that they are treated with barely disguised contempt by the mainstream media. Claims that murdered reporters were not clearly identified are implausible, given the sophisticated technology employed by the Israeli military, noted Qudah. “Since October 7, 2023, Palestinian journalists have been slaughtered with impunity, while the world watches,” she said.
Journalists bearing witness to the toppling of the old world order and the now routine contempt shown for international law in conflicts zones such as Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon have “suffered particularly badly”, said veteran BBC foreign correspondent John Simpson.
Writing for The Nerve website in April, Simpson said the rules of engagement in places such as Lebanon and the West Bank had left reporters at much greater risk. "In circumstances like these – and I’ve often driven round in Lebanon or the West Bank with other journos for company, praying the Israelis won’t decide we’re spies – the only real protection you can have is some sense on the Israeli side that there’ll be serious consequences if they kill you. That sense has disappeared."
Yet, the killings go on, largely because criticism has been muted in the U.S. Israel(s key ally supplies much of the ordinance used to murder their colleagues, say reporters in the region. After her first brush with death, Ftouni condemned the “silence of the international community that let this happen”.
As Steve Sweeney, a British reporter for the Russian state-owned media network RT, who narrowly escaped being assassinated in Lebanon this year, said in April: “Any other country in the world would find themselves isolated on the world stage.”
Khalil’s shocking death prompted calls for investigations into attacks on journalists. Sunday Times chief foreign correspondent Christina Lamb recently called for the creation of an independent international task force to investigate crimes against journalists.
Flak jackets emblazoned with the word “PRESS” no longer afford their wearers a degree of protection, Lamb said, according to the Press Gazette; instead, they have made them targets.
“It shouldn’t need saying but let me say it: Journalists are civilians. Deliberately targeting them is a war crime,” Lamb told an annual meeting of the Network for Investigation and Prosecution of Genocide, Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes in The Hague.
“And yet, just as with sexual violence in conflict which I write about a lot, accountability is the exception not the rule.
“We take risks to shine a light on injustice and bring back stories of those who can’t. We are not saying we should be special, just treated as the civilians we are and left to do our job.”
David McNeill is professor of communications and English at University of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo, and co-chair of the FCCJ’s Freedom of the Press Committee. He was previously a correspondent for the Independent, the Economist and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is co-author of the forthcoming book Japanese Rebels: Non-Conformists in a Conformist Society.
Justin McCurry is the Japan and Korea correspondent for the Guardian. He is the author of War On Wheels: Inside Keirin and Japan’s Cycling Subculture (Pursuit Books, June 2021), published in Japanese as Keirin: Sharin no Ue no Samurai Wārudo (Hayakawa, July 2023).
