Lebanon’s health ministry blamed Israel for the attack. Camera crews filmed the damage to the area in Hasbaya, Lebanon, where the ministry said the journalists had been staying.
CreditCredit...Reuters

Israeli Strike Kills 3 Journalists, Lebanon’s Health Ministry Says

The three worked for Lebanese news organizations, their employers said. The ministry said they had been staying in a residence housing journalists.

by · NY Times

Three journalists were killed in an Israeli airstrike early Friday in southern Lebanon, according to their employers and the country’s health ministry.

The three were killed in a residence where journalists were staying in Hasbaya, a town near Lebanon’s border with Israel, the ministry said. Three other people were wounded in the strike, the ministry said.

The Al-Manar network, operated by the militant group Hezbollah, reported that a cameraman working for the broadcaster was killed. Al Mayadeen, an outlet widely seen as aligned with Hezbollah, said a cameraman and a broadcast engineer with the network were among the dead.

Israel’s military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the strike.

Eighteen journalists from seven news organizations were at the site of the strike, Lebanon’s minister of information, Ziad Makary, said.

Hasbaya had been generally considered a safe area, where people fleeing the fighting in nearby southern Lebanese towns had taken shelter.

Reporters Without Borders, the international advocacy group, said in a statement this month said journalists in Lebanon had narrowly escaped Israeli strikes or had been forced to flee their homes, and that journalists in the country should be allowed to report on the expanding war there without danger or harassment.

Earlier this week, Al-Mayadeen said that one of its offices in Beirut had been hit by an Israeli military strike. Israel said it had targeted civilian buildings used by Hezbollah to manufacture or store weapons. The offices were unoccupied, having been vacated at the start of Israel’s invasion, the network said, and there were no reports of injuries.

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 its national security, raiding its offices in the West Bank and accusing it of being “used to incite terror.”

Last November, two television journalists working for Al Mayadeen were killed in a strike blamed on Israel in southern Lebanon, shortly after a live broadcast. A month earlier, a cameraman for Reuters was killed and six other journalists injured amid clashes along Lebanon’s border with Israel.

In a report published this month, the Committee to Project Journalists 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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