BEIRUT: Lebanon accused the Zionist entity of targeting journalists in a "deliberate” attack that killed three media workers in the country’s south on Friday, calling the incident a "war crime”. Lebanese television channel Al Mayadeen said cameraman Ghassan Najjar and broadcast engineer Mohammad Reda were killed in the strike on a journalists’ residence in Hasbaya, south Lebanon.
Another TV outlet, Al-Manar, run by Hezbollah, said video journalist Wissam Qassem was also killed in the strike on a bungalow located in a resort that several media organizations covering the Zionist-Hezbollah war had rented out. After the strike a car bearing a "press” marking was crushed under debris. Roofing tiles were blown off, and rubble littered the inside of the bungalow and its surroundings.
Journalists from other media organizations were also sleeping nearby when the strike hit, in an area outside Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds. "I woke up to the whistling sound of a missile and found my door burst open while thick smoke rose from the garden. I thought there was a fire,” Sky News Arabia correspondent Darine El Helwe told AFP. "We were asleep in our rooms, without our bulletproof vests and helmets,” she said.
Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati said the strike "targeting journalists” was among the "war crimes committed by the (Zionist) enemy”. He also said the attack was "deliberate”. Earlier, Information Minister Ziad Makary said the Zionist entity had "waited for the journalists’ nighttime break” to strike while they slept. "This is an assassination, after monitoring and tracking, with prior planning and design, as there were 18 journalists there representing seven media institutions,” Makary wrote on X.
International Committee of the Red Cross president Mirjana Spoljaric told AFP that journalists are "protected persons”. "And you know the approach of applying propaganda is not eliminating this protection,” she added. The Zionist military on Friday said it had struck more than 200 militant targets in Lebanon over the past day, as it announced the deaths of five soldiers in fighting in south Lebanon. United Nations peacekeepers said Zionist soldiers fired at one of their observation posts in south Lebanon this week, adding the security situation was "extremely challenging”. – AFP