Zainab al-Khalil walks among the trees of her home’s entrance garden in Baysarieh, Lebanon, 2.5 miles south of the nearest major city, Sidon. She is dressed in black as a sign of mourning. A small cat named Mishu plays between her feet. Two months prior, Zainab’s sister, Amal Khalil, brought the kitten home. “Our source of joy during the war,” al-Khalil tells The Progressive.
On April 22, Amal began her usual morning routine: She watered her garden, cared for their sick mother, cleaned the house, and fed Mishu and her three other cats. Then, as she did everyday, the journalist for Al Akhbar (“The News” in Arabic) set out with photographer Zainab Farraj and entered south Lebanon’s Israeli-occupied zone. Despite the purported ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah on April 16, the region has since been largely destroyed by bombardments and home demolitions. Amal was part of a convoy of vehicles documenting the return of displaced people to their homes in Lebanon as a result of the ceasefire agreement.
But at 11 p.m. that night, Amal was found dead in the village of al-Tayri, the victim of a “double-tap” Israeli drone strike designed to maximize casualties.
The war in Lebanon became one of the deadliest conflicts for journalists since the genocide in Gaza. Israel has continued to commit war crimes despite the ceasefire agreement, destroying homes, attacking paramedics, and killing journalists.
On the morning of Amal’s killing, her sister says she had a bad feeling. “I told her not to go,” al-Khalil says. “She told me she was going to Bint Jbeil, and we argued. I told her it wasn’t safe, that it was inside the Yellow Line”—a six-mile-wide strip along the Lebanon-Israel border which the Israeli military has occupied since the ceasefire agreement with Lebanon. But her family says Amal was a responsible journalist who would never go somewhere unless she believed it was safe.
“She always felt that if you wanted to talk about the people of the South, you had to be there with them,” her sister adds.
As Amal and Farraj passed near al-Tayri at around 2:30 p.m. that day, the car in front of them was struck by an Israeli drone, immediately killing the two civilians inside that car. Amal and Farraj took refuge in a nearby building.
“Everyone started calling me asking about her. I felt something was wrong,” al-Khalil recalls. The Lebanese Civil Defense was in contact with the two journalists while coordinating an evacuation path to get them to safety. But the evacuation plan required the use of a communication system between the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), Israel, Hezbollah, and the Lebanese Army known as “the mechanism,” whose operators didn’t respond or rejected the requests.
“Amal kept replying to me that everything was fine, that they were waiting for the Red Cross and the Lebanese Army to pick them up and bring them home,” says al-Khalil. Later, she says, she realized Amal was likely just trying to keep her family calm, and was in fact very aware that the situation was dire. Fifteen minutes after that call, al-Khalil learned that Israel had attacked again. The Civil Defense rescue team asked Amal and Farraj to try to move closer to their location inside a nearby house, as the teams couldn’t reach them. When they moved toward the car to escape, an Israeli drone dropped a grenade on them, injuring Amal. At around 4 p.m., Amal and Farraj ran to another building for shelter, while Amal maintained contact with her family, the Civil Defense, and her editors at Al Akhbar.
“I’m stuck here, there are Israeli strikes, we can’t get out. Can somebody please contact UNIFIL? Contact the Israelis,” Amal pleaded in a message to the Red Cross. But help never arrived.
The last time al-Khalil spoke with her sister was at 4:22 p.m. “She answered the phone, but I couldn’t hear her voice.” Five minutes later, the building where they were sheltering was targeted in an Israeli airstrike. Al-Khalil kept calling Amal, but there was no connection.
Israel would not allow anyone to approach the strike site from the beginning of the attack, rejecting diplomatic requests from the Red Cross and Civil Defense for rescue access. Still, the rescuers eventually managed to reach the area under fire. Around 6 p.m., they found Farraj alive under the rubble. Israeli fire then hit the ambulances and a drone dropped another grenade nearby, forcing the rescue teams to retreat immediately to the nearest hospital in Tibnin. Later that night, the Lebanese Army escorted another rescue convoy back to the attack site, where they found Amal’s body beneath the rubble.
“Those eight hours were hell, a horror movie for us,” says al-Khalil, who was waiting in Amal’s room when she received the news. She had no time to process it as her family burst into tears and screams. “I tried to hold everyone together, to keep them strong, as if Amal were still here. It was the worst moment of our lives,” she says.
After her killing, thousands of people gathered to bid farewell to her in Baysarieh. Women threw flower petals from balconies on top of her coffin, wrapped in the Lebanese flag, as a group of men carried it through the streets. The procession to the cemetery was filled with the cries of relatives, friends, and colleagues accompanying her to her final resting place.
Among them was Hussein Ibrahim, an Al Akhbar journalist and Amal’s friend. “Her work was extremely important for the newspaper,” Ibrahim tells The Progressive. “She brought real stories from the field for twenty years. Not many journalists do that.”
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Mourners carry tributes to Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil, who was killed by an Israeli drone strike while reporting a story.
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Mourners carry journalist Amal Khalil’s casket through the streets of Baysarieh, Lebanon.
Ibrahim describes her death as an execution. “They attacked her car,” he says. “They knew it was her. Both journalists were clearly identified with helmets and press vests.”
Ibrahim says he believes Israel viewed Amal as a “priority target” because she played an important role in exposing its crimes in south Lebanon. But Al Akhbar, he says, will not be intimidated out of continuing its work. “When Israel kills someone like Amal, they will not stop killing others,” he says. “These attacks on journalists are unprecedented in history.”
Israel has justified its killing on Amal and sixteen other journalists in Lebanon since March 2 as “necessary defense against terrorists.” But the war crimes against journalists have long been common practice for Israel. Just days after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, an Israeli Defense Forces tank deliberately targeted a group of journalists covering Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel in solidarity with Gaza. Reuters correspondent Issam Abdallah was killed in the attack, while Agence France-Presse journalist Christina Assi survived with severe injuries, including the loss of her right leg. Since then, Assi has continued her work as a journalist while also becoming an advocate for journalist protection.
When Assi learned about the killing of Amal, she recognized the same pattern used in the attack against them in 2023. “It didn’t start with or after us,” Assi tells The Progressive. “It started with Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank, and even before. They killed her live on TV with a sniper shot, and during the funeral they didn’t even let the procession pass normally.”
Assi points to Israel’s so-called Legitimization Cell, a secretive military unit tasked with gathering intelligence and linking journalists and other civilians who expose Israel’s crimes to Hamas or Hezbollah. Israel, she says, intentionally accuses journalists “of operating or giving information to Hezbollah, or Hamas in Gaza, without any kind of evidence”—claims which then circulate in the mainstream media without much scrutiny. Under international humanitarian law, journalists are considered civilians, and, as Assi points out, protected from direct attacks or intentional targeting under the Geneva Conventions. But “instead of focusing on the killing of journalists,” she says, “all the effort turns into proving that these are journalists. Regardless of whether they work with organizations affiliated with Hezbollah or Hamas, they are protected by the international law.”
“And their killing won’t erase the truth,” says Assi. “It’s all documented. We all watched it. We all witnessed the killings.”
Amal’s family is devastated, but they say they remain stronger than ever as they continue to raise their voices in remembrance of Amal. “We demand that the government stop merely documenting these crimes and begin taking action,” says al-Khalil. “Amal is not just a number. Maybe they won’t achieve anything, but we will do everything possible. We will always raise her voice because she would have done the same for any colleague.”
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Amal Khalil’s niece, Rawan Jaber, stands beneath a portrait of Amal in their family home.
Amal, al-Khalil says, was deeply connected to both the land and the people of south Lebanon. She wanted to tell stories about how people lived, about communities and social struggles. She did not travel south simply to report stories: She built close relationships. She organized campaigns to collect donations of money, toys, and clothes, and even used part of her salary to help rebuild schools and hospitals destroyed by Israel.
“That’s why they threatened her several times,” says al-Khalil. “They even called the newspaper and sent messages. One of them warned her that if she wanted to keep her head on her shoulders, she should stop traveling south.”
But Amal always dismissed the threats, operating by the mantra that “no one should be left behind.” If Amal were still alive, her sister says, she would tell the world: “Always say the truth, no matter what.”