I can't put into words just how morally bankrupt this all is. He was literally their employee. My head is hot.
Lebanon said on Saturday that Israel had launched a deadly strike on Friday that killed a Reuters journalist and injured six other journalists from Agence France-Presse, Reuters and Al Jazeera.
The Lebanese army said in a statement that “the Israeli enemy fired a rocket shell that hit a civilian car belonging to a media team, leading to the death of Issam Abdallah”, AFP reports.
Lebanon’s foreign ministry called the strike a “deliberate killing” and a “crime against freedom of speech and journalism”.
Fatima Kanso, Abdallah’s mother, said: “Israel deliberately killed my son. They were all wearing journalists’ gear and the word ‘press’ was visible. Israel cannot deny this crime,’” Reuters reports.
The AFP photographer Christina Assi and AFP video journalist Dylan Collins were among the six journalists wounded.
“We were filming smoke billowing from Israeli artillery fire targeting a distant hill in front of us,” Collins told the AFP, adding, “There was no military activity in our direct vicinity and no artillery fire near us.”
Al Jazeera has also accused Israel of launching the deadly strike, which injured its reporter Carmen Joukhadar. Joukhadar said she and her colleagues had been filming footage on a hill “in an open-air area, without any military sites near us”.
AFP reports Joukhadar running to her car for shelter when the first strike landed. “Then I thought I shouldn’t be close to the car, so I ran and the second strike hit” the vehicle, Joukhadar said.
An Israeli military spokesperson said that the military was looking into the circumstances surrounding the deadly strikes.
Issam Abdallah's last instagram post on October 7th.