Three journalists were killed in an Israeli air strike as they slept in a residential compound housing media workers in southern Lebanon in the early hours of Friday, an attack condemned as a war crime by a Lebanese government official.
Those killed were cameraman Ghassan Najjar and broadcast engineer Mohammad Reda, who worked for Al Mayadeen, a pro-Hizbollah and pro-Iran Lebanese TV channel, the network said. Hizbollah’s Al Manar TV said its camera operator Wissam Qassim was also killed in the air strike.
Local media broadcast live from the scene in Hasbaya, showing multiple bungalows reduced to rubble, with several cars visibly marked “PRESS” crumpled among them.
The attack is the latest indication that Israel has widened the scope of its targets in Lebanon beyond Hizbollah military infrastructure, striking rescue workers, financial institutions and journalists as well as local government buildings.
Israel stepped up its offensive against Hizbollah in September, initially saying its goal was to push the group back from the Lebanese border to ensure that about 60,000 people forced from their homes in northern Israel by rocket fire would be able to return.
But after killing much of Hizbollah’s leadership, Israel appears to have expanded its goals, launching air strikes across the country and invading the south.
Hasbaya, a religiously mixed area, had largely been spared from Israeli air strikes, leading journalists covering the fighting to move there, away from the front line.
Three people were wounded in the attack, Lebanon’s health ministry said.
“This is a war crime,” said Ziad Makary, Lebanon’s minister of information, adding that 18 journalists from seven media outlets were staying in the compound.
“The occupation’s [Israel’s] targeting of the journalists’ residence was deliberate,” Ghassan bin Jiddo, director of Al Mayadeen, said on the channel’s X account.
There was no immediate comment from Israel.
The strike came as Lebanese authorities reported another 24 hours of intense air strikes and shelling, which killed 19 people and raised the death toll to nearly 2,600 since October 2023 — most of those in the past four weeks. The fighting has also displaced more than 1mn people.
The Israel Defense Forces said it struck about “200 terror targets” in southern Lebanon over the past day, killing a local commander of Hizbollah’s elite Radwan force.
Ten Israeli soldiers were also killed during the fighting in southern Lebanon over the past two days, Israel said, bringing the toll on the Israeli side to 27 deaths since the IDF invasion of its northern neighbour.
More than 80 Israeli soldiers and civilians have been killed over the past year in northern Israel and during the ground incursion into south Lebanon. Two Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed and another seven people injured on Friday when a Hizbollah rocket struck a shopping centre in the town of Majd-al Krum in the country’s north, said local health authorities.
The Lebanese militant movement began firing into Israel in the days after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack from Gaza, triggering the ongoing hostilities including Israel’s punishing offensive of recent weeks.
Israel has been criticised for striking hospitals, schools and Lebanese army soldiers who are not party to the conflict, as well as UN peacekeepers. But it says its attacks target Hizbollah militants and military infrastructure, and accuses the militant group of using civilians as human shields.
On Friday, the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon said its troops were forced to withdraw from an observation post earlier this week after IDF soldiers, who had been observed conducting operations, “fired at the post”.
Unifil has accused the IDF of hitting its positions and injuring its troops in more than a dozen incidents since Israel’s ground invasion began.
On Thursday, an Israeli air strike killed three Lebanese soldiers as they tried to evacuate wounded people from the border village of Yater, the army said. Israel did not comment on the attack.
Friday’s assault on the media workers’ compound came a day after an Israeli strike hit one of Al Mayadeen’s offices, located in a six-storey residential building in southern Beirut. One person was killed and five were wounded in that strike, Lebanon’s health ministry said.
The killings brought the number of journalists killed in the past year of fighting in Lebanon to six, including two of Al Mayadeen’s journalists who were killed in southern Lebanon in November, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which condemned the strike.
The war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza has also claimed high numbers of casualties among journalists. The CPJ said at least 128 mostly Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed in the enclave since the start of the conflict, making it the deadliest period for journalists since the campaign group began gathering data in 1992.
Earlier this week, Israel accused six Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza of belonging to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, citing documents seized in Gaza — the latest accusation in an ongoing feud with the Qatari-backed network.
Al Jazeera strongly denied the claims, which it said were based on “fabricated evidence”.
The CPJ said Israel had “repeatedly made similar unproven claims without producing credible evidence”.
It cited the example of an Al Jazeera correspondent who was killed in Gaza in July by Israel, which later produced a document that claimed the correspondent had received a Hamas military ranking in 2007, when he would have been 10 years old.
Additional reporting by Neri Zilber in Tel Aviv
Cartography by Steven Bernard