Apr. 27, 2026, 6:57 PM EDT
By
Hussein Ibish
The killing of veteran Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil last Wednesday represents among the worst elements of the renewed fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, particularly the dangers to civilians posed by Israel’s new “buffer zone.” And if Israeli military officials are to be believed, the goal may be to create a huge area under permanent Israeli control.
On March 1, Hezbollah launched a salvo of projectiles, after which Israel demanded all civilians leave all of southern Lebanon that lies south of the Litani River. Over a million people left their homes and flooded into Beirut. While working as a journalist within that zone, Khalil was killed by IDF troops (and a colleague of hers was severely injured).
Khalil’s employer, Lebanese government officials and rights groups said Khalil’s car was clearly marked and rescue workers were prevented from reaching her for hours as she slowly died under rubble. Israeli officials said they were in a car that left a Hezbollah-linked building driving toward the “yellow line” delineation of a new “buffer zone” in southern Lebanon.
The overwhelming backlash I witnessed created political space for a clear repudiation of Hezbollah’s militia status and authorization for the Lebanese Armed Forces to disarm the group.
Israel has cast Khalil as a Hezbollah operative and, thus, a legitimate target. She worked for Al Akhbar, a newspaper with pro-Hezbollah sympathies, but there is no evidence Khalil was anything other than a reporter. It cannot go unnoticed that Israel has a long history of killing troublesome journalists such as Shireen Abu Akhleh, a Palestinian American Al Jazeera reporter who was shot to death in 2022 while wearing a clearly marked blue vest labeled “PRESS” in the occupied West Bank.
The war in southern Lebanon has followed Israel’s Gaza playbook: near-total depopulation and destruction. The aim has been to deny Hezbollah any supportive environment by removing the entire society.
But the IDF’s new “yellow line” map suggests Israel wants to gobble up a large chunk of Lebanese territory south of the Litani that it has been coveting since the early 1950s, quite possibly to divert waters from that river and the Wazzani River (both of which flow down from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights) and cut Lebanon off from one of its two offshore gas fields. There is far more potentially at play here than just security or “buffer zone.”
And it’s all likely to backfire and strengthen Hezbollah. The Lebanese government, which has shown a greater willingness to confront and contain Hezbollah than it has in the past, has been compelled to strongly denounce Israel’s conduct. Protests by Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and President Joseph Aoun, echoing the Committee to Protect Journalists and other groups, indicate how badly Israel has misread the political equation.
Salam and Aoun led the cabinet in immediately denouncing Hezbollah for resuming hostilities and engineered a hitherto unthinkable unanimous cabinet decision identifying all of the organization’s paramilitary activities and arsenal illegal,