Three staff members of Lebanese news organizations were killed in an Israeli airstrike early Friday in southern Lebanon, according to the country’s health ministry, the latest in a growing number of deaths among media workers covering Israel’s offensives in Lebanon and Gaza.
The three were killed in a residence where journalists were staying in Hasbaya, a town near Lebanon’s border with Israel, according to the ministry. Three other journalists were wounded in the strike, the ministry said.
The Al-Manar network, which is owned by Hezbollah, reported that a cameraman working for the broadcaster was killed. Al-Mayadeen, an outlet widely considered sympathetic to the Lebanese militant group, said a cameraman and a broadcast engineer with the network were also among the dead.
The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment on the strike. In the past, Israel has accused the two networks of amplifying Hezbollah’s perspective amid its war with the armed group, and it has banned Al-Mayadeen from transmitting and working inside Israel.
International humanitarian law states that journalists cannot be considered military targets.
“Journalists, regardless of political affiliation, are considered civilians and intentionally directing attacks against civilians would amount to a war crime,” said Ramzi Kaiss, a Lebanese researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Eighteen journalists from seven news organizations were staying in the house in Hasbaya, Lebanon’s minister of information, Ziad Makary, said. Photos of the aftermath show that at least three vehicles clearly marked “PRESS” were parked at the residence. People nearby said there was no warning before the strike.
“I was brushing my teeth when the strike happened,” said Zakaria Fadel, a photographer for the Lebanese production company ISOL, who was staying in a nearby building and was injured.
He quickly rushed to the house that was hit to check on the journalists who were sleeping there.
“I broke the door and went in,” he said. He found a colleague trapped under the wreckage.
“It took a lot of time to lift the rubble that was on his head so that he could breathe, and then we kept lifting the rubble until we were able to take him out,” he said.
Mr. Fadel suffered injuries to his back, hands and legs. None would require surgery, he said.
Hasbaya had been generally considered a safe area, where people fleeing the fighting in nearby southern Lebanese towns had taken shelter. Journalists from international and Lebanese news outlets have used the town as a base to report on the conflict along the Israeli border.
The director of Al-Mayadeen, Ghassan Bin Jiddo, accused Israel on Friday of deliberately targeting the residence where the journalists were staying. “We hold the occupation fully responsible for this war crime,” he said in a statement.
This week, Al-Mayadeen said that one of its offices south of Beirut had been hit without warning by an Israeli military strike. The offices were unoccupied, having been vacated at the start of Israel’s invasion, the network said. The Israeli military said in a statement after the attack that it had targeted civilian buildings used by Hezbollah in the area.
On Wednesday, Israel’s military accused six Al Jazeera reporters based in Gaza of being fighters for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Al Jazeera strongly denied the accusations, which it said were based on “fabricated evidence” and followed a long history of Israeli hostility toward the network. Israel has repeatedly accused the Qatar-based broadcaster of being a threat to its national security, raiding its offices in the West Bank and accusing it of being “used to incite terror.”
The strike in Hasbaya was not the first time that journalists in Lebanon have been killed amid the war.
Last November, two television journalists working for Al-Mayadeen were killed in a strike blamed on Israel in southern Lebanon.
A month earlier, a cameraman for Reuters, Issam Abdallah, was killed and six other journalists injured after being hit by Israeli tank fire, according to a U.N report. The journalists had been “clearly identifiable” as members of the press, the report said.
In a report this month, the Committee to Project Journalists, an advocacy group, concluded that the death of the Reuters journalist was “an early example of the Israeli military deliberately targeting journalists for their work.”
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