Human Rights Watch on Monday urged Lebanon to pursue justice two years after an Israeli strike killed a Reuters journalist and wounded six others, including two from AFP.
The October 13, 2023 attack killed Issam Abdallah and wounded two of his colleagues from Reuters, as well as two people from broadcaster Al Jazeera, and AFP's Dylan Collins and Christina Assi as they were working in south Lebanon near the Israeli border.
The attack took place just days after Lebanon's Hezbollah group initiated cross-border exchanges with Israel over the Gaza war.
Photographer Assi was seriously wounded and later had to have her right leg amputated.
On Thursday, Lebanon's government tasked the justice ministry with investigating legal options for prosecuting Israel for crimes against journalists.
The government's move "offers a fresh opportunity to achieve justice for the victims", Human Rights Watch said in a statement, noting that two years since the attack, "victims of war crimes in Lebanon remain without effective access to accountability and justice".
Since Abdallah's killing, "scores of other civilians in Lebanon have been killed in apparently deliberate or indiscriminate attacks that violate the laws of war and amount to war crimes", HRW's Ramzi Kaiss said in the statement.
A November ceasefire sought to end more than a year of hostilities including two months of open war between Israel and Hezbollah, but Israel has kept up its strikes, usually saying it is targeting Hezbollah sites and operatives.
Free-press watchdog Reporters Without Borders last week also welcomed the government's move, saying "Lebanon is finally taking action against impunity for the crime" and urging Beirut to refer the case to the International Criminal Court.
Morris Tidball-Binz, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions said Friday it was "a premeditated, targeted and double-tapped attack from the Israeli forces, a clear violation, in my opinion, of IHL (international humanitarian law), a war crime".
An AFP probe into the deadly attack, jointly conducted with Airwars, an NGO that investigates attacks on civilians in conflict situations, pointed to a 120-mm tank shell only used by the Israeli army.
A UN investigation found there was "no exchange of fire" before the attack.
