Hunted While Reporting: Israel Kills Journalist Amal Khalil In Cold Blood, Leaves Her Colleague To Burn
The Levant Files team condemns this attack with every fibre of our being — and condemns every act of violence against journalists, anywhere in the world, by anyone who carries it out.
They went to document the dead. They became the story. On Wednesday, April 22, two women journalists drove into the southern Lebanese village of At-Tiri to cover yet another Israeli strike — and were hunted down in broad daylight, in what Lebanese officials and press freedom groups are now calling a calculated "double-tap" assassination. One came home in a body bag. The other survived, barely, to tell the world what happened.
Amal Khalil was 43 years old. She had spent nearly two decades chronicling life and death in southern Lebanon for Al-Akhbar — a woman who refused to look away, who kept reporting when others fled. On Wednesday, she was killed — not on the front line, but while sheltering from a strike, trapped under rubble, burning. Beside her, photographer Zeinab Faraj, just 21 years old, lay wounded for hours as help was kept at bay. Faraj survived. Khalil did not. She was the ninth journalist killed in Lebanon in 2026.
Three Strikes. No Escape.
It was not one strike. It was three. According to Faraj and Lebanese authorities, the sequence was methodical, relentless — each blow closing the trap tighter. The two journalists had arrived in At-Tiri to cover an Israeli drone strike on a civilian vehicle that had already killed two people, one of them a relative of Faraj. They had barely stopped their own car when Israel struck again — this time hitting them. They leapt out of the burning wreckage and sprinted toward the nearest building, desperate for cover. It was the last place Khalil would ever stand.
"I saw Amal like that, burning, telling me, 'Zeinab, I'm burning,'" Faraj told The National from her hospital bed, her head wrapped in bandages, her face bruised and swollen. An Israeli surveillance drone hung in the sky above them as she dragged her burning colleague inside. Then the third strike came — crashing into the very building where they had fled for their lives, bringing the walls down on both of them. In the darkness and the dust, Khalil told Faraj: "Don't fall asleep. Don't leave me."
Left to Die: Seven Hours Under the Rubble
What followed is almost too cruel to recount. For more than seven hours, Amal Khalil lay trapped beneath the rubble — injured, alone, slowly dying — while the world outside tried desperately to reach her. Lebanese officials and witnesses allege that Israeli forces systematically blocked every rescue attempt: firing on roads, deploying sound grenades against ambulances, targeting Red Cross vehicles with drones. At approximately 4:10 p.m. local time, Khalil made one last phone call — to her family and the Lebanese military. Then silence. Her body was recovered long after it was too late.
"Amal Khalil, an unarmed civilian journalist, remained trapped under the rubble for more than seven hours while the Red Cross was prevented from reaching her," said Sara Qudah, regional director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The words land like a verdict. Qudah did not mince them: the obstruction of rescue efforts, she said, may constitute a war crime under international humanitarian law. An unarmed woman. A journalist. Left to die while drones circled above.
The Israeli military denied everything. It does not target journalists, it said. It did not obstruct medics. The vehicles, it claimed, had crossed a "forward defence line" and departed from a Hezbollah military structure. Khalil's body, recovered from the rubble of a building she ran into to survive, offered its own rebuttal.
They Told Her to Stop. She Didn't.
In September 2024, Amal Khalil received a WhatsApp message from a number attributed to the Israeli military. The message was unambiguous: stop reporting, or leave Lebanon — or worse. She stayed. She kept writing. She kept bearing witness. On Wednesday, the CPJ warned, the threat may have been carried out. Elsy Moufarrej, head of the Union of Journalists in Lebanon, did not hesitate: Israel, she said, deliberately targeted Khalil. This was not the first time. Less than a month ago, three other journalists died in a near-identical double-tap strike on a clearly marked press vehicle in the same region. Khalil was the ninth journalist killed in Lebanon in 2026. Nine. In four months.
The condemnations came swift and furious. Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam called it what it was: "crimes against humanity." "Attacks on journalists and obstruction of rescue efforts are war crimes," he said. President Joseph Aoun, who had personally tried to secure Khalil's rescue during those seven desperate hours, condemned Israel's "deliberate and consistent targeting of journalists" — a campaign, he said, designed to "conceal the truth of its aggressive acts against Lebanon." The truth Khalil died trying to tell.
The Levant Files Condemns All Attacks on Journalists
The Levant Files condemns this attack with every fibre of our being — and condemns every act of violence against journalists, anywhere in the world, by anyone who carries it out. Amal Khalil gave twenty years of her life to the people of southern Lebanon. She documented their homes when they were shelled, their children when they were killed, their villages when they were erased. She was warned to stop. She didn't. That is what courage looks like. Zeinab Faraj, twenty-one years old, lies in a hospital bed because she had the same courage. Journalists are not combatants. They are not targets. They are civilians protected under international law — and their murder is not a military tactic. It is a war crime. We demand a full, independent investigation. We demand accountability. And we demand that the world stop looking away.
Photo: International Press Institute