AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Lebanon. On Thursday, President Trump announced the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire will be extended by three weeks. Despite the announcement, Israel is continuing to carry out deadly strikes in southern Lebanon.

On Wednesday, Israeli forces killed five people, including the prominent Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil, a correspondent for the daily newspaper Al-Akhbar. Khalil and her colleague, photographer Zeinab Faraj, were reporting from southern Lebanon when an Israeli drone struck a car near them, killing two civilians. Amal and Zeinab then sought shelter in a nearby building, but Israel then struck that building, as well, in what’s been described as a double-tap strike. Rescue and medical workers rescued Zeinab Faraj but came under fire before they could rescue Amal. They were prevented from returning to the site for hours. Amal Khalil died by the time her body was recovered over six hours later. She’s at least the ninth journalist killed in Lebanon this year.

The Lebanese President Joseph Aoun accused Israel of the, quote, “deliberate and consistent targeting of journalists” in an effort to, quote, “conceal the truth of its aggressive acts against Lebanon,” unquote. The Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam called the killing “a blatant war crime and a crime against humanity,” unquote.

On Thursday, thousands gathered for the funeral of Amal Khalil. At the funeral, the Lebanese reporter Ibrahim Dawi recounted learning about the death of his colleague.

IBRAHIM DAWI: [translated] At exactly 11 p.m., one of my friends in the Army called me. He told me, “Ibrahim, step aside for a bit.” My heart skipped a beat. He told me, “There’s bad news.” He said, “Amal is gone.” I said, “You must have found her.” Amal is strong. Amal is a hero. Amal knows how to hide. She has 20 years of experience in wars. She knows where to go. I said, “Are you sure Amal was killed?” He said, “Yes, Amal was killed.”

AMY GOODMAN: Amal Khalil’s brother Ali also spoke out at her funeral on Thursday.

ALI KHALIL: [translated] Amal, after all, she’s not just my sister and not just a member of our family. Amal was a journalist, a media professional. There’s a ministry responsible for her, a ministry that demands her rights. It’s not me personally who demands them. As my sister, I’ll take her to her grave and fulfill my duties towards her, but her professional rights are with her ministry and with institutions. There’s no charter, no charter, no law in the world, none of them, that allows targeting a journalist.

AMY GOODMAN: Amal Khalil was 43 years old. She had worked as a reporter for 20 years. Al Jazeera reports Amal had previously received direct threats from an Israeli phone number on WhatsApp warning her to stop reporting. In 2024, Amal Khalil told local media she had received an Israeli death threat, warning her to leave southern Lebanon or risk decapitation.

AMAL KHALIL: [translated] I received direct targeting on my phone from the Israeli Mossad. They threatened to kill me. They literally said, “We will separate your head from your shoulders if you don’t leave from the south.” They advised me to leave the south.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman in Seattle, Washington, with Juan González in Chicago. Hi, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Hi, Amy. And welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re joined now by two guests. Steve Sweeney is the Lebanon bureau chief for RT, the Russian news channel. He was injured in an Israeli strike last month. He’s in Beirut. In Paris, we’re joined by Sara Qudah, the Middle East and North Africa regional director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Sara, let’s begin with you. You have a new article headlined “We had Amal Khalil by her hand’s grip. Then Israel murdered her.” Can you lay out what you understand happened on Wednesday?

SARA QUDAH: Yes, of course. Thank you, Amy, for having me.

So, the circumstances surrounding Amal Khalil’s death, really, it raises multiple overlapping concerns. Amal was on an assignment with her colleague, Zeinab. They were heading to the south, to Bint Jbeil. And on their way, there was a strike close by to them, so they ran away and sheltered in a building. And then, this is where the building where they were sheltering was struck, as you mentioned. And it was known that those two journalists were sheltered and trapped inside this building.

Zeinab managed to — sorry, Amal herself, she managed to call her family and to call the Lebanese Army to inform them about their situation. And yet, the Red Cross was not able to get to them in time and rescue Amal. At the beginning, the Red Cross was able to go there. They were able to rescue two civilians and Zeinab, but then, under fire, they had to leave, because also Amal was deep under the rubble. So, they had to leave, and when they tried to come back, they were blocked. Eventually, when they were able to go there, she was killed. She was dead, and it was too late. If this obstruction did not happen, we might have Amal alive between us today, but because of the obstruction, she is killed today.

And this is what makes this constitute of a war crime and requires an international investigation. Otherwise, the killing of Amal would be the same as the over 260 journalists who have been killed by Israel over the three past years with full impunity.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Sara, of course, the Israelis continue to deny that they target journalists. But what do you make of the fact that Amal herself had claimed that she had gotten threats from an Israeli number in the past and that she was told to stop reporting?

SARA QUDAH: Israel has a pattern in denying these claims and in also smearing journalists, saying that they are terrorists, and they attack them and kill them because they are terrorists and a threat on Israel. So, this is not new. And for Amal being threat, several journalists, including the journalists’ union in Lebanon, they were aware of these threats, and they saw the messages. So they are not claims — they are true, they are correct. And Israel has this pattern since 2023 threatening journalists. We have seen this with Anas al-Sharif in Gaza, with Hamza Al-Dahdouh in Gaza and with other journalists around the region.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d also like to bring in Steve Sweeney to the conversation, a British correspondent for Russia Today. You were at Amal’s funeral. You knew her. Could you talk about her?

STEVE SWEENEY: Well, yes. I mean, the brutal killing of Amal Khalil is not only a tragedy, but, as the previous speaker said, it’s a war crime. Now, Amal had been working in the field for 20 years, since the 2006 war. She was very well known. She was very well loved by everybody. We call her “the queen of the south,” and she belonged to the people. She was — what she did was incredibly unique, this work that she was doing, raising the voices of the people, particularly in the south of Lebanon. She would go from village to village speaking to them, and they were telling their stories about the brutality that had been meted out to them for decades by the Israelis. So, she was a very, very powerful voice. She was an experienced journalist, as well.

And we were all — when we heard the news that she had been caught up in the Israeli airstrikes and that she was trapped under the rubble, we were all waiting with bated breath, really, to see what happened. And as we’ve heard, the Israelis blocked those rescue efforts. They attacked the emergency services, the Civil Defense workers, the Lebanese Army, to stop them from retrieving the body.

And Amal herself had received some very serious death threats from the Israelis over the years, threatening to behead her, warning her to keep out of the south. Now, it’s a testament to her steadfastness of — not just of Amal, actually, but of all of those journalists working in the south of Lebanon, that they’re refusing to leave the field. Now, this is what Israel is trying to do. It’s trying to prevent the truth from being reached by a much, much wider audience to see the war crimes that are being carried out there on a daily basis.

Now, our crew, the RT crew, myself and my colleague, Ali Rida Sbeity, we were also targeted in an airstrike reporting from the Qasmiyeh Bridge. Now, Israel consistently says that it doesn’t target journalists. It’s repeated this again since they killed Amal. But you have to remember, Israel has the most advanced military technology in the world, but it also has the most advanced surveillance technology in the world. It uses artificial intelligence, for example. It knows every single car number plate, every single vehicle. It reads our messages. It listens to our conversations. This is why we talk about these strikes being deliberately targeted. Now, in our case, they claim that it wasn’t, but there’s absolutely no doubt in our mind that this was an attempt to kill us. You could see from the footage where the missile strikes the bridge. The bridge was already destroyed. It was no longer — there was no military objective in targeting the bridge. We had also consulted with the Lebanese Army, who have a barracks or a base at the end of the bridge. And they said, “Yes, it’s perfectly safe. It’s fine for you to go and film.” Now, had that bridge been under threat at any stage during our time on the bridge, then the Israelis would have got a message to the Lebanese Army via UNIFIL — this is generally what happens in those situations — asking them to pull away and withdraw from the bridge, and then they’ll get back in touch to let them know that it’s safe.

So, the attack on us, the killing of Amal, and then, just a few weeks ago, we had the killing of Ali Shoeib, Fatima Ftouni and Mohamed Frouni in a — again, in a targeted strike. Israel, again, admitted to carrying out that strike. They said that they were targeting Ali Shoeib. They said that he was a member of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force. Now, again, this is inconceivable. The photograph that they published, as Fox News discovered when they asked the IDF, they admitted that it was photoshopped, and they didn’t have any other evidence. But this is part of a pattern that we’ve seen with the smearing of journalists. They’ve tried it again with Amal. They’ve said that she was in the field, she was giving out Hezbollah positions, she had come from Hezbollah military positions, this kind of thing, exactly the same narrative that we saw being played out in Gaza, where they’ve killed hundreds of journalists.

Now, Israel, for all that it says, it’s killed more journalists in the past — well, since October 2023, than were killed in the First World War, Second World War, Vietnam War, Afghan War and Iraq wars combined. So, it’s a complete fallacy to say that they don’t target journalists. The issue is, mainly, that if any other country had committed acts of these massacres of journalists in the way that Israel does, any other country in the world would find themselves isolated on the world stage. They’d be subjected to sanctions, arms embargoes, trade embargoes. But instead, the opposite is happening. The killing of journalists is continuing, while the most powerful nations on the planet, including the United States and Britain, continue not only to give the political support, but the military support to enable these acts to be carried out. So, they are equally as culpable for the deaths of Amal, for the deaths of Ali, Fatima and Mohamed. They’re equally as culpable as Israel. They are the ones that load the gun while Israel pulls the trigger.

AMY GOODMAN: Steve Sweeney, just to be clear, on that day in March, I wanted to go to a short clip of what happened to you.

STEVE SWEENEY: Further rocket attacks were reported against Nahariya. And a minute —

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Steve Sweeney, Lebanon bureau chief for RT, the Russian news channel, an Israeli airstrike right behind him. And I also wanted to ask you, Steve, about the Lebanese president weighing in in the case of Amal. Aid workers tried to get to her. They had gotten to Zeinab. She had a terrible head wound. But explain what happened, what — a sound bomb and live ammunition. And the Lebanese President Aoun said that the Lebanese Red Cross should be able to save her, after hours where they could not?

STEVE SWEENEY: Well, yes, that’s right, the statement from the Lebanese presidency and, again, from the Prime Minister Nawaf Salam denouncing the attack as war crimes. President Aoun said, of course, that the Civil Defense workers, the emergency workers, should be able to get to the journalists as they were trapped under the rubble.

Now, there’s been some criticism leveled at the pair of them, at Joseph Aoun and Nawaf Salam. And what people are saying is, well, there’s — at the moment, there’s this discussion around sovereignty. There’s these so-called peace talks and negotiations. But President Aoun had to, effectively, beg Israel to allow the emergency services to enter what is essentially Lebanese sovereign territory to rescue Lebanese citizens. So, there’s some criticism that’s been leveled at him by other journalists, by Amal’s family, as well, because, you know, she lay under that rubble for seven hours whilst the emergency services were blocked from entering. They were attacked, yes, with sound bombs, with live ammunition. Even when Zeinab Faraj was — when she was rescued, when she was being taken to the hospital, that ambulance came under fire. You can see and you can find these images on social media if you don’t have them, but there are bullet holes in the ambulance that took her to hospital.

Now, this is nothing new. The attacks on emergency workers are nothing new. This is something that’s been happening fairly consistently, consistently in the — particularly in the south of Lebanon. Since the Israeli escalation on March the 2nd, there’s been nearly 2,500 people killed, and around 100 of those are emergency workers. Now, we’ve seen in that period, they called it a ceasefire. But during that time, it’s really just — and this announcement of the three additional weeks by Donald Trump, essentially, it’s an extension allowing Israel to carry out more war crimes in the south. They created this so-called yellow zone, which is, you know, the Gaza-style yellow zone, which means 55 settlements, border towns, villages are effectively cut off. The local people, the people that live there, are not being allowed to return. Their homes are being detonated. Entire settlements have been completely destroyed. Hospitals have been destroyed. Ambulances have been set on fire.

AMY GOODMAN: Steve — 

STEVE SWEENEY: Schools have been detonated. Sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: Steve, we have to break, but I wanted to go back to Sara Qudah to, finally, ask you about another story the Committee to Protect Journalists has been closely following. A court in Kuwait has just acquitted the U.S.-Kuwaiti journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin on charges of spreading false information and harming national security, after he posted about the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran on social media. He’s expected to walk free from a Kuwaiti prison today, capping 52 days behind bars, posting video that others posted, including the national networks here in the United States. Can you explain what happened and what he faced and what you think will happen today?

SARA QUDAH: Thank you, Amy. It’s very difficult to move from a very tragic and sad story to another, good one. Finally, Ahmed Shihab-Eldin has been acquitted from the charges against him. And at CPJ, we are so relieved for this information. We do not have a lot of information from his international legal team on what will happen and what’s going to happen today or the coming days. But we have known — it is known that he has been fully acquitted from all charges against him.

Ahmed Shihab-Eldin was visiting his family during the Iran war, and it is known that since March 2nd, he stopped posting or appearing in public. It was known also that on March 3rd, he was arrested because he reposted on his social media accounts a video that was taken, but taken and verified by other international media outlets, and he just reposted this video. He was arrested because of that. And, of course, one of the charges on him was anti-state charges, because the Kuwait, just like other Gulf countries, they’ve forbidden any kind of media footages of geography or reporting on what was happening during the Iran war in the Gulf.

AMY GOODMAN: You have talked about his arrest, the CPJ has, as part of a much wider crackdown on online journalism and free expression in Gulf nations, Sara.

SARA QUDAH: That’s true, because since the war started, from day number one, since the Iran war started late February this year, all the — almost every single Gulf country has put out new rules and new laws that are restricting freedom of expression. They banned taking photographs or publishing anything, or even speaking in a very casual way, not in a journalistic manner, about what is happening. And those are very concerning, because we are talking about countries that already have a tight grip on the press and freedom of expression. So. when they even tighten this more and put out more laws that are restricting journalists and freedom of expression and citizen journalists, we are talking about a severe decline in freedom of expression, in countries that the people, the citizens, are in much need for verified information to know what is happening around them. So, we are also depriving the information consumers from their right to know what is happening.

AMY GOODMAN: Sara Qudah, I want to thank you for being with us, Middle East and North Africa regional director at the Committee to Protect Journalists. And I want to thank Steve Sweeney, the Lebanon bureau chief for RT. He was speaking to us from Beirut, she from Paris.

Coming up, New York City Councilmember Chi Ossé. He was violently arrested earlier this week at a protest against deed theft, a practice that has led to many evictions of longtime homeowners. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: Tom Morello performing “Black Spartacus.”