A funeral has taken place in Lebanon for three journalists killed by an Israeli strike on Saturday, after the Lebanese government called the killings a “blatant war crime”. The victims were Ali Shoeib, a correspondent for the Hezbollah-owned al-Manar television station, and Fatima Ftouni and her brother Mohammed Ftouni, a cameraman for the pro-Hezbollah outlet al-Mayadeen.
Israel claimed the attack shortly afterwards, saying the target was Shoeib, whom it accused of being a Hezbollah “terrorist” in an intelligence unit who had reported on the locations of Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military provided no further evidence to support the claim and made no comment on the deaths of the other journalists.
Hundreds of people attended the funeral, where the bodies of Shoeib and Fatima Ftouni were draped in their channels’ logos and with bouquets of flowers. “Fatima and Ali were heroes,” a relative of Ftouni’s who gave only his first name, Qassem, told Agence France-Presse.
Shoeib was a well-known war correspondent in Lebanon, where he reported for al-Manar for nearly three decades. Fatima Ftouni had also been reporting from the frontlines of the Israel-Hezbollah war in recent days. Her own family had been killed in Israeli strikes weeks earlier.
The three journalists were struck as they were driving in Jezzine, a district in south Lebanon far from the frontlines. Local television showed at least four missiles were shot at the car. International law says that regardless of political affiliation, journalists are considered civilians and targeting them is a war crime.
Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun, described the journalists as “civilians doing their professional duty”. The French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, said journalists working in war zones “must never be targeted, including when they have links with parties to the conflict”. Lebanon’s minister of information, Paul Morcos, said the killing “constitutes a deliberate and blatant war crime against the media”.
