An Israeli strike that killed 3 Lebanese journalists was most likely deliberate, watchdog says

BEIRUT (AP) — An Israeli airstrike that killed three journalists and wounded others in Lebanon last month was most likely a deliberate attack on civilians and an apparent war crime, an international human rights group said Monday.

The Oct. 25 airstrike killed three journalists as they slept at a guesthouse in southeast Lebanon in one of the deadliest attacks on the media since the Israel-Hezbollah war began 13 months ago.

Eleven other journalists have been killed and eight wounded since then, Lebanon’s Health Minister Firass Abiad said.

More than 3,500 people have been killed in Lebanon, and women and children accounted for more than 900 of the dead, according to the Health Ministry. More than 1 million people have been displaced since Israeli ground troops invaded while Hezbollah has been firing thousands of rockets, drones and missiles into Israel — and drawing fierce Israeli retaliatory strikes.

Human Rights Watch determined that Israeli forces carried out the Oct. 25 attack using an air-dropped bomb equipped with a U.S.-produced Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM, guidance kit.

The group said the U.S. government should suspend weapons transfers to Israel because of the military’s repeated “unlawful attacks on civilians, for which U.S. officials may be complicit in war crimes.”

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military on the report.

The Biden administration said in May that Israel’s use of U.S.-provided weapons in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza likely violated international humanitarian law but that wartime conditions prevented U.S. officials from determining that for certain in specific airstrikes.

The journalists killed in the airstrike in the southeastern town of Hasbaya were camera operator Ghassan Najjar and broadcast technician Mohammed Rida of the Beirut-based pan-Arab Al-Mayadeen TV, and camera operator Wissam Qassim, who worked for Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV.

Human Rights Watch said a munition struck the single-story building and detonated upon hitting the floor.

“Israel’s use of U.S. arms to unlawfully attack and kill journalists away from any military target is a terrible mark on the United States as well as Israel,” said Richard Weir, the senior crisis, conflict and arms researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Weir added that “the Israeli military’s previous deadly attacks on journalists without any consequences give little hope for accountability in this or future violations against the media.”

Human Rights Watch said that it found remnants at the site and reviewed photographs of pieces collected by the resort owner and determined that they were consistent with a JDAM guidance kit assembled and sold by the U.S. company Boeing.

The JDAM is affixed to air-dropped bombs and allows them to be guided to a target by using satellite coordinates, making the weapon accurate to within several meters, the group said.

In November 2023, two journalists for Al-Mayadeen TV were killed in a drone strike at their reporting spot. A month earlier, Israeli shelling in southern Lebanon killed Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah and seriously wounded other journalists from France’s international news agency Agence France-Presse and Qatar’s Al-Jazeera TV on a hilltop not far from the Israeli border.