Amal Khalil

Amal Khalil was a 42-year-old Lebanese journalist who had reported from southern Lebanon for the Beirut daily Al Akhbar since the 2006 war. Born in the coastal village of Baysariyyeh in the Saida district, she spent her career covering the region she came from, filing on the lives, deaths and destroyed homes of southern Lebanese villages through successive rounds of fighting with Israel. She stayed in the south when the war resumed in 2023 and reported through it. In 2024 she received a threatening phone call from an Israeli number warning her to leave the south and threatening to destroy her home; she kept working. On 22 April 2026 an Israeli airstrike hit a vehicle in the village of al-Tayri. Khalil and her colleague Zeinab Faraj took shelter in a nearby three-storey building, which was struck in a follow-up attack. Faraj was seriously wounded. Khalil remained trapped under the rubble for more than seven hours while the Lebanese Red Cross was prevented from reaching her by Israeli fire. Her body was recovered shortly before midnight. CPJ and RSF have called for an international investigation into her killing.