Lebanon files complaint to UNSC over deadly Israeli strike on journalists

Lebanon has complained to the United Nations Security Council over the latest Israeli strike on journalists, according to the Lebanese Foreign Ministry.

The Beirut government said on Monday it had submitted the complaint to the UNSC over an Israeli strike last week that killed three journalists in the country’s south.

The Israeli strike early on Friday hit a complex in the Druze-majority town of Hasbaya in southern Lebanon where more than a dozen journalists from Lebanese and Arab media outlets were spending the night asleep.

Iran condemns ‘deliberate' Israeli attack on journalists in Lebanon

Tehran condemns the Israeli airstrike on a journalist compound in southeastern Lebanon.

Lebanon submitted the “complaint to the Security Council regarding the latest Israeli attacks that targeted journalists and media facilities in Hasbaya in south Lebanon, and the Ouzai area” in Beirut’s southern suburbs, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry said in a statement posted on social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

“The repeated Israeli targeting of media crews is a war crime” and Israel must be “held to account and punished,” the statement added.

Al-Mayadeen cameraman Ghassan Najjar and broadcast engineer Mohammad Reda and video journalist Wissam Qassem from Al-Manar television were killed in the strike on the complex where they were sleeping in Hasbaya, relatively far from the frontline.

The Friday attack marked the deadliest strike targeting media personnel since clashes erupted last year between the Israeli forces and Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement.

Lebanon's Prime Minister Najib Mikati said the attack was a deliberate military strike and both he and Information Minister Ziad Makary labeled the attack as a war crime.

"The new Israeli aggression targeting journalists" was among the "war crimes committed by the Israeli enemy," Mikati said in a statement, adding the attack was "deliberate" and "aims to terrorize the media to cover up crimes and destruction."

Makary also noted that "the Israeli enemy waited for the journalists' nighttime break to betray them in their sleep. This is an assassination, after monitoring and tracking, with prior planning and design, as there were 18 journalists there representing seven media institutions. This is a war crime." 

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