Reuters World News - How we investigated the killing of a Reuters journalist

Episode Date: December 10, 2023

Nearly two months after the death of Issam Abdallah on the Lebanon border, a Reuters investigation has found that an Israeli tank crew killed him by firing two shells in quick succession. Join bureau chiefs Maya Gebeily and Anthony Deutsch as they recount their extraordinary reporting journey to determine the cause of their colleague's death and hold those responsible to account. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Seven journalists are on a sunny hilltop in South Lebanon to cover cross-border shelling by Israel. Each of them gives a sort of embarrassed smile as the camera turns towards them. The cameraman, Isam Abdallah, then turns the phone on himself momentarily. He, like the others, is wearing a blue press vest and helmet. He's also smiling, doing what he loves. Later, Isam is killed. AFP photographer Christina Assi is grievously wounded. After a nearly two-month investigation, Reuters can now say that an Israeli army tank fired the shot which killed Isam.

Israel has denied targeting journalists and also said it is investigating, though those results haven't been made public. In a statement Friday, Israel said the incident took place in an active combat zone, and that Lebanese Hezbollah fighters had on that day attacked across the border, and Israeli forces opened fire to prevent a suspected armed infiltration. On today's episode, we'll talk to the journalists who uncovered the truth behind Isam's killing, and the journey they undertook to gather and analyze the evidence needed to come to this conclusion. reporters Anthony Deutsch and Maya Jabali have gathered evidence from the scene. They spoke to more than 30 government and security officials

to military experts, forensic investigators and witnesses to piece together a detailed account of the incident. And they join us now. Hi, Anthony. Hi, Maya. Hi, Kim. Hello there. Maya, you're based in the Beirut newsroom. Can you just start by telling us a bit about your,

role and your work with Issa? So I'm the Beirut Bureau chief. I'm responsible for the coverage in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. And in the Beirut Bureau, we've got a team of mostly visuals journalists, actually. So we've got a few text correspondence, but we've got a pretty large visuals team for that office. And Isam is one of the people that was a really core part of that team and that you could send out Isam. That's why we can never just call him a cameraman, because you could send out Isam and he would do everything. He would do the video, but he would do the photos. He would do the text. He would build sources. He would get amazing story ideas. And so he was really a pillar of our production because he just was so good at his job. And Anthony, you're over in The Hague and you've done a lot of work on war crimes, munitions, investigations. Tell us about how you became involved in this investigation looking into how Isam was killed. Yeah, so I've been reporting for more than 25 years and have done.

done quite a bit of conflict reporting, covered war crimes trials back to the Balkan war crimes trials, Milosevic, and a lot of others out of the Hague. And so when this came up, our kind of global news editor asked if I had any ideas about any investigators or specialists who might be able to help us pin down exactly what had happened. And we're going to go through the steps of that investigation piece by piece because there is a lot to it. But I just wondering if you could. can start by taking us back to the day that Isam was killed, Maya. What was happening? Where were you? It was, I mean, unfortunately, it was Friday the 13th, Friday, October 13th. And Isam had been in the south

with two other Reuters colleagues who are Iraqi, Mahir Nazia and Thaer Sudanian. They had been in the south for a couple of days at that point. They had been covering essentially cross-border shelling along the southern Lebanese border with Israel in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th. The following day, Hasbalah started to launch rockets into Israel, and that just launched kind of daily cross-border shelling. And so on Friday the 13th, we were in the office. It was evening. The live was going. I was on one side of the office, and our colleague Timor Azadhi was watching the live on the other side of the office as he was working on a few other things. and we could hear kind of the soft

the distant thudding that we had been able to hear kind of all day on that live they've been going live for about 45 minutes at that point and all of a sudden we heard this really loud crash

and Timur goes guys guys guys and I look up at him and he says it's our team and in my head I was like he must be referring to Gaza he must be referring something that loud or an explosion that loud and bombardment that close

we knew it had been happening every single day in Gaza, and we thought that was our live that had been going on there that had been very nearly missed or something like that. And I look at him and I go, you mean our Gaza live, right? And he goes, no, no, here. And so that's when I rushed over. I looked at the screen. The screen had been, it was covered in dust. It was gray. I couldn't really tell it was going on. And you could hear in the background, who we later learned was Christina Hassee, the AFP photographer, screaming about her legs. We could hear her colleague, Dylan Collins, also cursing in the background.

and that was all we could hear, and then the life went dark. And what was going through your mind at that point? At that point, it was just, I need to get the facts of who's okay and who's not okay. And so the first person I called was Isam, because Isam was somebody who was very security-minded. He was the person who, he had two first aid kits on him at all times. He's the person that you call in the office if you need some kind of security advice. And he's also the friend that I called when my car battery died, and I knew that he would be the one person with jumper cable. He was that person to people inside the office and outside the office.

And he was somebody who didn't take unnecessary risks ever. He was an extremely seasoned journalist. And so in my head, the first person I'm going to call is him because he's going to have taken all the necessary protocols. And he's the person that I want to hear from in a moment like that. And so I called him. I remember it was exactly 602 p.m. I called him and he didn't pick up. And that's when we started to just check all the TV stations that were broadcasting from the area

because they were not the only journalists that were there at the time. And we managed eventually to get on the phone with Mahir, with Thaer, and ultimately with Dylan, who confirmed to us that he'd been killed. Could you take that all in straight away? You know, in those moments, we had a lot of people in the office who were very close to him, and I remember being very conscious of wanting to make sure that we could be 10,000 percent sure of the fact that it had happened before I, announced anything to those in the office. There was obviously a general state of shock, a general state of panic. At that point, what I had not seen was that there were videos circulating of his body.

I hadn't seen them at that point. All I was doing was just making phone calls to get, you know, to get someone to confirm to me what had happened. And our first priority, of course, was to be able to get the confirmation, not for our own news purposes, but to be able to inform his family. And ultimately, we called Isam's mother and we informed her, which is the hardest thing that I think obviously any mother would have to hear, but it's not something that any news reporter ever wants to say to anybody else about their relative. And then it was about making sure that we could get our colleagues who had been wounded, Mahar Nizhi, and Thadar Suddani, the kind of support and care that they needed to have in those immediate first few hours. Anthony, obviously over in

the Hague, the news of Isam's death, it went around the world, it went around the newsroom. And I guess how did you respond? What? What? did you think when you had heard this news? I was kind of disbelief that another Reuters photographer had died doing his job. And I got a note from my colleagues at the AFP, who of course their photographer was also wounded in the strike. And of course, I, having covered a lot of war crimes trials and following a lot of how evidence is gathered and how evidence is presented in a courtroom, that kind of that thinking cap went on and started thinking about what would be needed to show exactly what had happened. So when, you know, when the Reuters news editor asked me,

you know, what could I help out and try to find some people who could do the analysis of the material that had been gathered by Maya and her team, the shrapnel from the crater, and other bits of broken equipment and all that stuff, I started talking to people who I knew in the Hague who had done investigations. Some of them were experts in munitions. Others had done their own investigations on attacks in Syria with munitions. So I started thinking about that. Maya, immediately after Isam was killed, we were able to say that the fatal shot came from the direction of Israel. Others were immediately. saying Israel was responsible. As we start talking about the investigation that you guys have done,

why was that? What was it that we needed to prove? So we set an extremely high burden of proof that we wanted to achieve that evening. We wanted to be able to answer every single follow-up question that was going to come up out of such a statement. So whether it was going to be what kind of weapon was used, what kind of weapon system launched from? Where was it launched from exactly? There were a lot of questions that night about whether it was a helicopter, a drone, a tank, two different types of munitions, the same type. There were a lot of questions that really we were not able to definitively answer until we put out the report. And so we really wanted to make sure that we had a 360-degree investigation that was essentially beyond reproach and beyond doubt.

And that's when we were ultimately able to produce over seven weeks. but on that first night, there were still so many questions that we could not answer. So just walk me through how you investigated this piece in the initial hours or days after Esam was killed. Where did you start? The very first thing that we wanted to gather as quickly as we possibly could were the witness statements from our colleagues that had been there, from Maher and from and from Thaer. They were obviously incredibly shaken up. They were incredibly traumatized.

And so we wanted to be sensitive to not retribes. dramatizing them in the immediate aftermath, but also knew that we wanted to get their memories of that incident as quickly as we could, basically, on the record, not for immediate publication, but on the record at the time. And so we interviewed AFP video journalist Dylan Collins. And then hearing Christina's voice, her screaming on the ground. And I ran to her immediately, and you can hear me in your footage and my footage. I'm trying to tell her she's okay. She's okay, you're okay, you're okay, you're okay. And then when I see the damage that was done to her legs, which is catastrophic, really,

I start saying fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, because I was pretty scary. Well, Maya was doing this. I was consulting with some experts who dealt in this and who had worked on cases of talking about what's the best way to do it. How do we preserve the chain of custody? How do we know who has had what piece when? write down what it is, write down who's handled it. How do you preserve it so that it's not contaminated, right?

You want to make sure that if there is any explosive residue on it, that you don't wipe that off, or that you're not mixing up pieces that are from different places. So they were giving me tips on how to do this, and I had to take off my journalist's hat and put on a forensic investigator's hat, which was a bit of a weird transition for me. Yeah, what we wanted really the most important,

important pieces were to try to get fragments from the crater itself. And thankfully, Maya and her team very early on when they had returned had done a video walkthrough and had taken photos, which you could actually see from that crater. You could see which direction the firing had taken place and you could see various pieces that were laying on the ground. And we identified what the key pieces would be. We then proceeded to make sure that we took every bit of evidence that we could recover from the car, the Reuters car, and from the equipment that had been at the scene. The tripods, the cameras, things like that that could have had any kind of residue on them that could have had any kind of any shred of evidence that would be useful.

We wanted to make sure that we had those locked away, sealed up in a way that could then be used not just for our story, but just to be analyzed with kind of the full integrity of that piece of evidence. And 36 hours later, we were able to actually access the site. So logistically, what are you doing? So you arrive, you've got a few minutes, what, you've got bags, you're just running around trying to find anything that looks like it might be useful? Essentially, we went there. It was myself. It was a Reuters security advisor, and it was a Reuters security correspondent that joined me on that trip.

And we had agreed ahead of time that given the kind of bombing had had taken place in the South up until then that any shelling that we heard that sounded like it was nearby, we would immediately evacuate. So our goal was to work as quickly as possible. We had plastic bags, we had tweezers, we had gloves. And so what we did when we got there was exactly what you said, can we? We just tried to work as quickly as possible and tried to pick up as many relevant pieces of fragments or what we thought could be fragments at the scene. And we were there ultimately for, I think about six or seven minutes. Shelling resumed, and we hit the ground after the first shell.

We looked up, there was enough of a pause. Then we dashed to the car. And I realized at some point that I hadn't picked up the bag of fragments that I had been putting bits into. And we got into the car and I kind of just stopped there for a second and realized I didn't have it with me, opened the car door, ran back, picked it up, got back in the car, and we drove off. We had Assam's tripod.

and some other of his equipment. And all of those could potentially be key in determining what type of munition had hit them because any fragment might be able to tell you based on the metal type or based on what type of explosive it contained, who had manufactured it and who might be using that type of munition. And you eventually find a piece of munition that killed Isam,

a fragment called the tailfin. Yes, so the tail fin assembly, which is the biggest fragment, which we actually retrieved separately from that first initial batch of fragments that we picked up ourselves on October 15th. That very same day, we were able to also locate Isam's flack jackets. One of the big mysteries for those two weeks had been where his flack jackets were. He was not buried with them, and we hadn't been able to determine where they were or tracked them down.

They weren't at the hospital. They weren't returned to us. They weren't at the police station. We just couldn't figure out where his flag jacket was. And we ultimately learned that they had been buried separately from him, and we were able to pick them back up. And so we actually asked somebody from the village to get it back out, to dig it back out. And our security correspondent went the following morning and retrieved it. And that was the same day that we were able to get the tailfin assembly as well.

And at some point, I was sitting there on that, it was a Sunday afternoon, I was sitting there with the tailfin assembly and his flack jackets in the same room. and it was one of the most surreal moments of my life because it was obviously what we had suspected at that time was the weapon that killed him and then obviously the flackjacket that he was wearing when he was killed. And our job at that point was to be able to link the tail fin without a shred of doubt to the scene of the incident.

Yeah, and at that same time we were having the discussion of, well, if we want to do an investigation and we wanted to be independent, we need to find a place to do that. So I was looking for the right people to do it and found them in the Hague. And they agreed to do to examine all the evidence. They have all this extremely high-tech, sophisticated lab capabilities to do all this type of analysis. But there was one problem. How are we going to get it from Lebanon to the Hague?

And I had talked to the lab in the Hague that had agreed to take the evidence, but they couldn't send anybody to Lebanon because there was no travel ban. there was a travel ban for Lebanon. So we were on the phone saying, well, how are we going to get it? And I said, well, I'll go. And so 12 hours later, I was on a 6 a.m. flight from Amsterdam to Beirut. So you take the evidence, the flackjacket and most essentially the tail fin piece of this tank ammunition to the Hague. And then what?

Yeah, so this is an organization called TNO. and they run independent laboratories and analysis. They do weapons and munition. They specialize in it. They test munition for the Dutch Defense Ministry. TNO scientist Eric Crone walked us through the analysis that was carried out at the lab in the Hague. So the distinct features are a 120 millimeter diameter.

And they looked at all the makers of this type of tank ammunition. We compared these features to ammunition that is available on the market. And they found two that it could be, and they were manufactured by a company named Elbit Systems, which is an Israeli weapons manufacturer. So we now know that munition, that tail fin that they identified was an Israeli-made tail fin. And there was some further analysis were done by TNO. I think it's worth mentioning, which is because we had various camera angles and we got some footage from Rai, which showed the second round being fired and the impact of that round. Albert Systems has declined to comment. And when we zoom into that area, you can see that the frequency changes and also the energy of the sound level changes.

And what they did was they did an audio analysis of that, and they compared the moment of the impact of the round and the moment that the round was fired. that the round was fired. And they were able to calculate the speed that the round traveled at. And this gives us the moment in time of the muzzle blast. And by doing that, they could determine the distance of how far away it had been fired. Wow.

And then they took two other points that we knew, where the journalists were standing, and where other camera was standing, and they did triangulation. And this was really actually the moment of magic by TNO is they were able to determine how far away, from how far away, the round had been fired, and that it was just across the border from Lebanon.

Here's the journalist on the hilltop, and here's the firing position, and as you can see, it's just behind the UN blue line. And that had been fired from a tank, and the only party in that conflict that we know has tanks is the Israeli defense forces. So the amount of evidence, Maya, so you have this tail fin,

You have these fragments from the site. You have hours of footage, photos, audio forensics. You have Isam's flack jacket. When you put all of these things together in your investigation, what did it tell us? What were you able to verifiably prove happened? What that body of evidence was able to show us was what we reported, which was that an Israeli tank crew killed Isam Abdelah

and wounded six other journalists by, firing twice on their location in southern Lebanon, that the tank fired two 120mm rounds from a weapon system that is manufactured, as Anthony mentioned, by Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems, and that the tank was positioned exactly at an Israeli military location that has firing ramps for tanks. It's on a hilltop southeast of where our team was standing and directly behind the blue line, which serves as basically the border between Lebanon and an Israel. The body of evidence that we had was able to point us to those major conclusions. So not only do we know that it was an Israeli round, we know that it was fired by an Israeli tank,

and we know that they were two of the same types of rounds, so two rounds fired within 37 seconds of each other, and it's really, yeah, it's extremely conclusive, and I think it leaves a lot wondering, waiting for some answers from the Israeli defense forces about how this happened. Your investigation prompted Reuters to send questions to Israel's military asking how this could have happened and to hold those responsible accountable. We got a statement from Israel as this podcast was being recorded saying the incident took place in an active combat zone and was under review and that Lebanese Hezbollah fighters had on that day attacked across the border and Israeli forces opened fire to prevent a suspected armed infiltration.

One of the important assessments that we have from international criminal law expert Carolyn Edgerton, who's worked on war crimes cases in the Balkans, was that these two back-to-back rounds fired at a group of clearly identified journalists, quote, is a clear violation of international humanitarian law and may also amount to the war crime of attacking civilians. She also said that filming Israeli tank positions at the border might have been considered a threat to the Israeli military if that information was seen to be of targeting value to forces in Lebanon. They were not caught in crossfire.

That's what we know. And it's really important to note that international law provides the same protection to media personnel as it does to civilians in conflict zones. And this week with the publishing of the investigation, our editor-in-chief, Alessandra Goloni, has obviously condemned the killing and has demanded of Israel to carry out an investigation into what took place and to hold the personnel who were responsible for those two strikes, responsible for the death of our colleague and for the wounding of others. Maya, when you look at all of the evidence that you've gathered, and as a colleague of Isam, but also as a friend, what does it mean to you to have done all of this to be able to put all of this together and come to these clear conclusions? It's a personal question because it gets to the way that I wanted to do this investigation from day one,

which was representative of everything that Isam was both in the newsroom and outside of the newsroom in the field, and both in his personal life. He did everything with an incredible amount of integrity. He did it with passion. He loved life so very much, all of its ups and downs, all of its challenges. He saw every tough assignment as an opportunity to bring out the best in himself, but also the best possible story that could just cut through to the heart of any view or halfway around the world. And there were some really challenging moments for us.

us in the last seven weeks as a bureau, as a team, as a group of colleagues who lost a very close friend, someone as close as a brother for many in the bureau, people that have worked with him for 17 years. And we really tried to stick it together and to put together an investigation, you know, with the help of incredible, incredible colleagues from all around the world. I mean, I feel like I've met, you know, half of Reuter is just working on this, on this investigation to put together something that he would have been proud of, that he would have loved in terms of It's diligence, its professionalism, its attention to detail, and the passion with which we really reported this out every single day. I mean, I can, we left no stone unturned. We were as diligent

and as focused as we possibly could be given the circumstances. It's important to note, of course, that we have a team of people in Beirut who many of them are from the South. Their home villages are still being shelled every single day. They are coming into the office and they're walking past Isam's desk and holding back tears every single day. And these are the people that worked to bring this investigation to life, that worked to make sure that we have a definitive version of the truth, a definitive laying out of the facts. And now that we have that, as a bureau, as a team, this is when we start to move forward

together and try to piece ourselves back together as a team. Anthony, you've obviously, as you mentioned, covered many conflicts, lost colleagues before. When you look back at this investigation and what you're able to conclusively report, what does it make you think in terms of how important is this work for you? Well, so I unfortunately never knew I some personally. and I can only hope that this, give me a second. It's okay, you take your time. Yeah, I can only hope that this, you know, honors Isam and his work

and that his colleagues have some sense that it's uncovered the truth. Thanks again to Anthony and Maya and to everyone. who worked on this investigation. If you haven't had a chance to read the full report, head to Reuters.com to check it out. Reuters World News is produced by Jonah Green, Tara Oaks, David Spencer, Christopher Waljasper and myself. Our senior producer is Carmel Crimmons,

and Leila de Kretzer edits the show. Engineering and sound design by Josh Summer. To make sure you know what's going on in the world, listen in for 10 minutes every weekday. And don't forget to subscribe. on your favourite podcast player or download the Reuters app.