Amal Khalil, a 43-year-old correspondent for the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar, died after Israeli forces prevented ambulance crews from reaching her for nearly four hours following an airstrike.
A reconstruction of Khalil’s final hours found that rescuers waited five miles away during a critical window when she was still alive and bleeding inside a collapsed building.
Khalil and fellow journalist Zeinab Faraj were reporting near the southern Lebanese town of al-Tiri when an Israeli strike hit a vehicle near theirs on April 22.
Both journalists survived the initial strike and exited their vehicle, but Khalil was wounded and took cover inside a nearby home, managing to contact officials with her location.
At 14:52, an Al Jazeera correspondent in southern Lebanon reached Khalil by phone in a call that lasted nine seconds, describing her as clearly out of breath but insisting she was fine.
Faraj later told the Associated Press that “Amal was crawling, she was wounded — her nose and head and shoulder and leg,” painting a dire picture of her colleague’s condition in the immediate aftermath.
A flurry of contacts followed between the Lebanese Red Cross, the Lebanese army, the United Nations peacekeeping force UNIFIL, and the Israeli military to secure safe passage for an evacuation.
Lebanon’s health ministry stated that “the enemy prevented the completion of the humanitarian mission, firing a stun grenade at the ambulance and targeting it with gunfire, so it was not possible to extract Khalil.”
When the press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders urgently contacted the Israeli military to halt airstrikes and allow rescue crews through, a spokesperson replied at 17:30 simply: “I’ll look into it.”
Shortly before midnight, after the Lebanese army, civil defense, and the Red Cross finally received clearance to approach the site, Khalil’s body was pulled from the rubble, according to Lebanon’s Union of Journalists.
Israel’s military denied that it targets journalists or that it prevented rescue teams from reaching the area, stating that individuals in the village had violated the ceasefire and that the incident was under review.
Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam accused Israel of war crimes, stating that the “targeting of media workers in the south while they carry out their professional duties is no longer isolated incidents, but an established approach that we condemn and reject.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists’ regional director, Sara Qudah, said: “The Israeli military’s obstruction of medical crews from rescuing wounded civilians is a brutal and recurring crime we have already witnessed in Gaza and now again in Lebanon.”
Qudah added that “Khalil, an unarmed civilian journalist, remained trapped under the rubble for more than seven hours while the Red Cross was prevented from reaching her.”
Khalil, born in 1984 in Baysariyyeh in southern Lebanon, had covered the region for Al-Akhbar since the 2006 war and had previously received threats via WhatsApp from an Israeli phone number warning her to stop reporting or lose her life.
