Israel's killing of journalists in Lebanon shows a lack of guardrails on its actions

It has often been described as a stalemate this week — this war that is now primarily centred on the Strait of Hormuz.

Not even the financial markets seemed to react much to the latest presidential decrees this week, which seem to bear little connection to unfolding events.

This was even though, slowly but surely, the military confrontations in the strait have been escalating, with both sides striking, or seizing, each other's assets.

And the "stalemate" description came even though Donald Trump had declared a ceasefire was underway in Lebanon, yet the two sides continued to launch assaults on each other.

In this war the claims and counterclaims — and their frequent detachment from reality — have become a story in themselves, as we try to line up what we can see and hear, with the various declarations of where the truth and strategic advantage may lie.

As Financial Times columnist Edward Luce wrote last month, it is a "strange situation where we await a statement from Iran to check whether there's any truth to what the US president is saying".

This of course was not Luce claiming the Iranians were the ultimate font of all truth, just a reflection of the lack of credibility that has been proved to be attached to pronouncements from the Trump administration.

An important time for journalism

In such times, the work of journalists becomes crucial to what we know of how events are unfolding, and how that might affect us all.

Journalists can be our eyes and ears in the middle of the conflict — to the extent that they are allowed on to the battlefield. But they are also the people who compile, corral and verify the riot of information with which we are now bombarded.

News that the regime in Iran was killing thousands of its own people in protests only came out as it was pieced together by the media.

Journalists — and the media — are far from perfect. But their ability to do their job remains a vital barometer of our confidence in how we understand the world in which we live.

Civilians get killed. Aid workers get killed. But you may never know this unless there are journalists who can tell their stories, who can corroborate and check the conflicting accounts.

Journalists are much more regularly challenged, reviled and abused in this age of social media platforms and presidential late night social media posts.

But, in general, the world still watches how they are treated, and demands they be respected when they are doing their job.

If nothing else, they are often the identifiable human faces of the people whose stories they are telling.

There was relief when this week a Kuwaiti court acquitted US-Kuwait journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin on all the charges he was facing after nearly two months in detention.

Ahmed, who has contributed to The New York Times, PBS, and Al Jazeera English, appeared to have been charged with spreading false information, harming national security and misusing his mobile phone after he posted a verified video showing a US F-15 fighter jet falling from the sky and crashing near Kuwait City.

The jet was one of three that were mistakenly shot down by Kuwaiti air defences.

Why does Israel keep killing journalists?

But a shocking aspect of recent conflicts has been the overwhelming number of journalists killed by Israel.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported in February that Israel was responsible for two-thirds of all press killings in both 2025 and 2024, two consecutive record years for press deaths.

More journalists and media workers were killed in 2025 than in any other year since the CPJ began collecting data more than three decades ago.

Journalists, by the nature of their jobs covering war, are at additional risk, and some of their deaths could have been accidental.

But it's not as if there aren't any other major brutal conflicts that have been going on in the world in the past few years. Ukraine and Sudan are just two that come to mind.

Yet it is Israel, which is supposed to be the great bulwark of democracy in a barbaric Middle East, that absolutely dominates the record books for its murder of journalists.

According to the CPJ, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have committed more targeted killings of journalists than any other government's military since 1992.

Israel often defends its actions by claiming the journalists are militants disguising themselves in press flak jackets. These are often unsubstantiated claims based on flimsy evidence.

It's not just journalists who have been killed in these circumstances, as illustrated by the case of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom and her colleagues. And no matter their profession, there is rarely a proper investigation carried out into such killings.

No-one has been held accountable for any of the murders of journalists we have sometimes witnessed with our own eyes, sometimes because Israeli jets or drones come back to strike wounded journalists and aid workers, and ambulances.

The IDF will often slow walk its responses, complicate them or claim journalists were the victims of mistaken identity or the fog of war.

The majority of journalists killed by Israel have been Palestinians. With the international media barred from entering Gaza, their eyes were our only view into the horrendous siege that took place there.

Israeli strikes kill Amal Khalil 

Journalists continue to be killed in Gaza, and now an increasing number are being killed by Israel in Lebanon.

This week, Lebanese journalists Amal Khalil, a reporter for the newspaper Al-Akhbar, and freelance photojournalist Zeinab Faraj were travelling in a convoy when the car in front of them was hit in a drone attack, killing the two people inside it.

The women's car was then hit by a grenade fired by another drone, forcing them to seek shelter in a nearby house.

That house was then targeted by fire from an Israeli jet. Faraj was eventually rescued but Khalil died under the rubble, after efforts to rescue her were reportedly obstructed by the Israeli military, which according to Lebanese officials also fired on the Red Cross and an ambulance that had come to their assistance.

The Israeli military said it struck the vehicle after identifying what it called an "immediate threat" linked to Hezbollah, and said it had received reports two journalists were injured as a result of the strikes. It denied it had obstructed rescue efforts.

In an interview last year, Khalil claimed that she had received direct death threats from the IDF when hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon escalated into full-scale war in September 2024.

"They literally said, 'We will separate your head from your shoulders'," she told the interviewer.

Khalil said she had always been aware of the risks of her job but, until then, had not taken particular precautions.

"They may tell me, 'Why do you want to do to this?' and I would say, 'I am as equal as these people,'" she was quoted as saying in translation.

"I may be targeted but as long as there is a woman in Houla, what happens to her happens to me."

She claimed she received "a direct target on my phone from the Mossad, from the Israelis. They threatened to murder me".

"They literally said, 'We will separate your head from your shoulders if you do not leave the south, and we advise you to leave the south'.

"They even included in their messages — and it was many messages sent to my private phone — several messages with personal information about me to make me feel [like] 'we know you well'."

Israel acting with apparent impunity

Khalil was from a Shia village in the south of Lebanon and she wanted to report on what was happening there, on what she called the desecration of whole neighbourhoods.

The Israeli military said the incident was under review and claimed the vehicles had crossed a "forward defence line" after leaving a Hezbollah-associated military structure, posing a threat to forces on the ground.

It added that it "does not target journalists" and takes steps to reduce harm to them while ensuring troop safety.

However, the Union of Journalists in Lebanon said that when medics attempted to rescue the women, Israeli forces prevented access to the site and used stun grenades.

A senior Lebanese army official said that it was only about four hours later that rescue teams were able to enter the area, escorted by Lebanese army forces and in coordination with UNIFIL, and recover Khalil's body from the rubble.

Lebanese reports further said a Red Cross ambulance transporting one of the wounded journalists to hospital in Tebnine came under Israeli fire and showed visible bullet marks.

The Lebanese health ministry said Israeli forces "prevented the completion of the humanitarian mission" by firing a sound grenade and live ammunition at rescue teams and ambulances attempting to reach the scene.

The CPJ's regional director, Sara Qudah, said in a statement that "the repeated strikes on the same location, the targeting of an area where journalists were sheltering, and the obstruction of medical and humanitarian access constitute a grave breach of international humanitarian law".

"CPJ holds Israeli forces responsible for the endangerment of Amal Khalil's life and the injuries Zeinab Faraj sustained after the targeted strike on their location."

This is not just a story about the killing of journalists, bad as that may be.

But it is about the apparent impunity with which Israel now acts, the exceptionalism which it asserts, and the fact that — like the US president who has empowered the Israeli government — there appears to be no normal guardrails on its actions.

That applies not just to how it treats journalists and ordinary people, but how it strides the world stage and attempts to influence global events.

There are many bad, rogue states at work in the world these days. But the world has continued to back some of them, even when their actions no longer tally with the values we supposedly hold.

Laura Tingle is the ABC's global affairs editor.