Journalist Amal Khalil who was killed while reporting in southern Lebanon [AP/Mohammed Zaatari]On April 22, the Israeli regime assassinated yet another journalist. Her name was Amal Khalil. She was a well-known Lebanese journalist, born during the early years of the last Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, who spent years documenting the lives of people in the south of the country amid Israeli invasion and bombardment.
Amal was well-known and beloved across Lebanon. As her brother, Ali Khalil, said at her funeral, she was present in every home.
For two years, Amal received direct threats from the Israeli regime. In one interview, she recalled a call from a Mossad agent who threatened to sever her head from her shoulders if she didn’t stop reporting from the south. They knew intimate details about her life – they wanted her to know that she was being surveilled.
Yet, she continued to report, knowing that any day the Israeli regime could follow through on its threats. Amal was the type of person Israel fears the most: the one who cannot be intimidated into silence, the one who cannot be sent cowering into a corner, the one who openly defies brutal Israeli power.
There is little doubt that the Israeli army targeted her directly. Al Akhbar, the outlet Amal worked for, released details of her killing. According to them, Amal was on assignment near the strategic town of Bint Jbeil, which she had often reported on in the past.
Bint Jbeil was the site of a key battle between Israeli regime forces and Hezbollah fighters before the ceasefire. It is a symbolic site of resistance for many Lebanese – in the 2006 invasion, it successfully repelled many attempts by Israeli regime forces to conquer it.
Amal was travelling in a car with freelance photographer Zeinab Farraj when a vehicle in front of them was hit by an Israeli drone. The two women sought shelter in a nearby building where they called relatives and colleagues for help. The building was bombed by Israeli forces not long after.
The Lebanese prime minister put out a statement calling on the Red Cross to intervene. The organisation sent out a team which was able to rescue Zeinab, who was wounded, from the building. They came under fire, so were unable to recover Amal. When they eventually returned, they found her dead.
Amal’s assassination is chillingly reminiscent of the killing of veteran Palestinian journalist and long-term Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh. Four years ago, she was also reporting from a site of symbolic resistance against invading Israeli regime forces – the Palestinian city of Jenin. She was shot in the head while attempting to shelter from Israeli fire with a colleague.
Since her killing, more than 250 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed – predominantly during the genocide in Gaza. Many of them were targeted on assignment, others were attacked while they were at home with their families. This was the case with Mohammed Abu Hatab who was killed along with 11 members of his family in an Israeli airstrike on his home in November 2023.
The Israeli regime’s targeting of Palestinian and Lebanese journalists is well documented, and the killing of Amal is the latest entry in a record that has become, since October 2023, the deadliest for the press in any conflict in recorded history. What is striking about this record is not simply its scale but the conditions that have made it possible.
Impunity is not merely a failure of justice after the fact, rather it is a permission structure that shapes what regimes believe they can do before the fact. The Israeli regime has learned, through decades of experience, that there is no act it can commit that will meaningfully cost it the support of its Western backers, and it has drawn the obvious conclusion.
It would be a mistake to characterise the Israeli regime as uniquely violent in the history of settler colonial projects and imperial regimes. But what distinguishes it is not the nature of the violence so much as the brazenness with which it is conducted, and that brazenness is itself a product of the impunity.
This is a regime that no longer bothers to disguise what it is doing. Journalists are not caught in crossfire; they are hunted down and targeted. The message being sent is not incidental, it is the point.
Amal understood the risk she was taking and took it anyway, as local journalists in Lebanon and Palestine have done throughout, because someone has to bear witness to what is happening to the people there. The Israeli regime killed her for it.
The world that claims to value a free press will mourn her briefly – just as it did Shireen – and then continue to provide the cover that makes the next killing inevitable.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
