For nearly five hours on the afternoon of April 22, Israeli drones circled above two women in the village of al-Tiri in southern Lebanon. The women were journalists. Amal Khalil, 42, a correspondent for the newspaper al-Akhbar, and Zeinab Faraj, 21, a freelance camerawoman, had come to document the aftermath of an Israeli strike. By nightfall Khalil was dead under the rubble of the building where the two had hidden, and the Israeli military was calling her and the two men killed before her saboteurs.
The reconstruction is precise and damning in its detail. Around 2:25 in the afternoon, a first strike hit a car ahead of the two women, killing Ali Bazzi, the local mayor, and Mohammed al-Hourani. Khalil and Faraj were a few meters away. Israeli surveillance drones then hovered over the area for the better part of an hour. Faraj said she could see a quadcopter through a crack in the roof, looking in, coming down and going back up.
Around 3:40, a second strike hit the journalists’ parked car. Both women were wounded. Khalil called the rescuer Moussa Chaalan and asked him to come get her, saying she could not do anything. They moved into a three-story building. A deconfliction request had gone to the Israeli military through UNIFIL about an hour and a half earlier, giving the exact rescue route and identifying journalists at the site.
At about 4:25, a third strike brought the building down. Khalil spoke to her sister one last time at 4:22 that afternoon. The Red Cross was kept out for hours. Faraj was pulled from the rubble around 5:40, bloodied, with injuries to her legs, hand, head and eye. Then a drone dropped a stun grenade and the rescuers retreated, leaving Khalil behind. The hospital recorded her death at around seven in the evening, cardiac arrest from a head wound. HRW’s timeline concludes she was most likely still alive when the rescue was turned back. The Israeli military granted a second access request at 8:15 that night, too late by an hour. At 8:27 it called the dead saboteurs.
The military’s account has not changed: two vehicles emerged from a building used by Hezbollah, the occupants crossed the front line and posed an immediate threat, the Air Force struck the vehicles and then the building where the infiltrators took shelter. Israel’s forces insist they never aim at reporters and try to limit harm. Faraj, who survived, says she never entered any military structure. She has said the pair were plainly marked as press, and that Khalil had been threatened over her reporting before.
Amnesty’s investigation draws on the survivor’s testimony, first responders, video, coordination records and a Washington Post investigation. Heba Morayef, Amnesty’s regional director, said the military knew or should have known that two civilian women were sheltering in that building and struck it anyway. Ramzi Kaiss of HRW was plainer: the Israeli military says it does not target journalists, but the facts and evidence show that it has repeatedly done so.
The findings land in a war already under scrutiny. The UN human rights chief warned in July that Israeli operations in Lebanon may amount to war crimes; the civilian toll has passed 4,300 dead and 600,000 displaced. For the journalists who still work in the south, the investigation is a warning about their own working conditions: the drones, the double strikes, the delayed rescue, all documented at al-Tiri, have become the normal texture of reporting there.
The killing of Khalil is not an isolated case. Rights groups count at least eight journalists killed in Israeli strikes this year. The pattern repeats with the same elements: drones that watch, requests that are filed, rescues that are delayed, and labels that arrive before the bodies are recovered. A military can deny an intention. It is harder to deny the drone that hovered above the cracked roof, waiting.