Rights groups call Israel’s killing of journalist Amal Khalil a ‘war crime’

Lebanese and international rights groups have accused Israel of intentionally targeting and killing a Lebanese journalist and obstructing medical workers from reaching her as she lay critically wounded.

Amal Khalil, a veteran reporter for the Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar, was killed in the attack on April 22 in al-Tiri in southern Lebanon . Photojournalist Zainab Faraj was critically injured.

On Thursday, Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International and Lebanese rights group The Legal Agenda released the findings of separate investigations into the attack.

HRW said the Israeli strikes “included apparently deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian objects, which would make them war crimes”.

Amnesty decried the “direct attack on civilians which should be investigated as a war crime”.

Both groups said the Israeli army “knew or should have known” that the women were civilians, noting that Israeli drones were at the attack site.

The Legal Agenda said its investigation found that the Israeli military’s actions “constitute war crimes and grave violations of international humanitarian law”.

Israeli forces bombed a building where both journalists had taken shelter after being forced to abandon their vehicle because of earlier Israeli strikes on or near their car. The Israeli military targeted the building, despite an appeal from the Lebanese Red Cross, relayed through the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), to evacuate the journalists from there, HRW’s report said.