𝒮𝒽❀𝓇𝓉𝓎

Portrait “AMAL” by her dear friend, English artist Tom Young, based in Lebanon Amal's Story This is Amal Khalil, one of South Lebanon’s most important journalists, killed by Israel on 22 April 2026 while doing the work she had spent almost twenty years doing: documenting the South. Amal was born in Baysariyyeh in 1984, into a landscape already shaped by Israeli occupation. As a child she could look from the roof of her family home toward villages still under occupation across the mountains. She grew up hearing stories of local men who had carried out resistance operations against Israeli forces, of imprisonment, demolished homes and families whose histories were inseparable from the struggle against occupation. Those stories stayed with her and helped shape the journalist she became. Amal wanted to study journalism at the Lebanese University in Beirut, but her father would not allow her to go. She studied Arabic literature instead and eventually found her way into journalism anyway, first through Lebanese publications and then to Al-Akhbar, where she joined before the newspaper published its first edition in 2006. For the next twenty years, she documented South Lebanon from inside it. The villages were never coordinates to Amal. They were homes and orchards, schools and families, places layered with memory, history and the names of martyrs. She wrote about Israeli occupation, bombardment, displacement, destroyed houses and agricultural land, but also about the stubborn continuity of life in the South: farmers returning to their fields, families rebuilding and villages refusing to disappear. Her journalism was openly rooted in that history. Amal did not pretend to stand above the struggle as some supposedly neutral observer. She regarded journalism itself as part of resistance, and her work has been described as militant journalism rooted in liberation, witnessing and the struggle against Zionism. She wrote for Al-Akhbar, an institution openly supportive of the Lebanese resistance, and she spoke about Hezbollah and the resistance from within the society that produced them rather than through the language of foreign governments and Western security establishments. But she was not an uncritical propagandist. She openly criticised allied media when she believed they exaggerated victories or obscured realities on the ground. She believed that supporting resistance also meant telling people the truth, and that journalists had a duty to convey reality and build its narrative. Her purpose was to document what was actually happening to the people of the South. When asked what resistance meant to her, Amal answered without hesitation: “Resistance is our fate.” As long as Lebanon lived beside the Israeli state, she believed that struggle would continue. She described resistance as an instinctive response among southerners to aggression. For Amal, it did not begin with Hezbollah. Its roots stretched much further back. She spoke of Maarouf Saad fighting Zionist forces in Tulkarem in the 1930s, of families from Kfarshouba whose relatives fought alongside Palestinians against Zionist armed groups, and of generations of Lebanese whose lives had been shaped by the same confrontation. She saw resistance as a historical continuum and spoke proudly about what she believed it had achieved. Amal credited the resistance with establishing deterrence between 2006 and 2023 and giving the South a period of relative security in which people rebuilt homes, invested in their villages and returned to life along the border. Her words were unequivocal: “The resistance remains our ceiling, our shelter, our security and reassurance.” This was not abstract politics to her. It was lived experience. In September 2024, that experience became brutally personal. Israeli strikes reached the Zahrani area and Amal’s own village of Baysariyyeh. Her aunt’s house was bombed, although those inside survived. Half an hour later, another cousin’s house was struck. His wife and child were killed. Amal later described the killing as unprecedented for the village and said her family was in shock. Baysariyyeh had historically been somewhere displaced families came to for safety. Now Amal’s own family became displaced. They left home with almost nothing. She described sleeping on the floor of an overcrowded house and wearing borrowed clothes, suddenly living the same experience she had spent years documenting in other families. But Amal did not simply flee. She and her brother drove the family to safety and then returned. She stayed close to the South and kept working. Then the threats came. In September 2024, Amal received direct threats from an Israeli number because of her journalism. She was warned that they knew where she was and would reach her when the time came. Another threat warned her that if she wanted to keep her head attached to her shoulders, she should leave. The threat became serious enough that the family temporarily stopped sleeping in their own home. Reporters Without Borders called for her protection. Amal continued reporting. When the ceasefire was eventually announced and her family began returning home, Amal did not follow them immediately. Her mind was already further south. She was thinking about which villages she could reach first, where the destruction was worst and where the people were whose stories still needed to be told. That was Amal. On 22 April 2026, she was travelling with fellow journalist Zeinab Faraj while covering events around Bint Jbeil. An Israeli strike hit a civilian vehicle travelling ahead of them, killing two people. Amal and Zeinab fled and sought shelter inside a nearby building. Israeli surveillance drones remained overhead. Their parked vehicle was subsequently struck, and then the building in which the two women had taken refuge was hit. Amal was trapped beneath the rubble and Zeinab was gravely wounded. What happened afterwards is crucial. Rescue workers attempted to reach them and the Lebanese Red Cross coordinated its movements, but according to investigations and witness accounts, rescuers faced Israeli fire and were forced back. A stun grenade was dropped near one rescue team and an ambulance was damaged by gunfire. Amal remained beneath the rubble for hours, badly wounded and unreachable while rescuers struggled to get to her safely. Her body was eventually recovered later that night. The Committee to Protect Journalists described her as having been murdered in the Israeli strike. Amnesty International later concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe the attack on Amal and Zeinab was a direct attack on civilians and should be investigated as a war crime. Human Rights Watch likewise found that the attacks included apparently deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian objects which, if established, would constitute war crimes. Their investigations were devastating. Israeli surveillance drones had been hovering over the area for nearly two hours after the initial strike. The journalists were unarmed civilians. The people Israel claimed to be targeting had already been killed. Yet the journalists’ vehicle was struck, then the building where the women had taken shelter was struck, and then rescuers attempting to reach Amal were unable to do so safely. Israel denied deliberately targeting journalists or blocking rescue crews and said the incident was under review. But Amal’s history makes what happened impossible to separate from the years before it. She was not an unknown person caught anonymously in a strike. She had spent two decades documenting Israeli occupation and attacks on South Lebanon. She had publicly defended resistance, received direct threats connected to her work and seen her own family struck by Israeli bombing. Relatives had already been killed. She had refused to stop reporting. Then, on 22 April 2026, she was trapped beneath the rubble of an Israeli strike while rescue workers struggled for hours to reach her. Amal Khalil was not a statistic. She was a daughter of South Lebanon who knew its villages and roads, its farmers and fighters, its mothers, its graves and its histories. She understood why people returned after bombardment and why families rebuilt houses that might be bombed again. She understood that the South could never be reduced to the language of military communiqués, and she spent her career documenting that truth. A bomb can destroy a home, a bulldozer can erase a road and fire can consume an orchard, but the witness remembers what stood there. The journalist records the names, the photographs remain, the testimonies remain and the archive survives. Amal understood that, and it is why her journalism mattered. Behind the public figure, the political voice and the journalist was also a private life. She was the daughter who planted lemon, orange, apple and avocado trees with her father around the family home, the woman who rescued stray cats and had a reputation within the family for taking in the weakest and sickest ones, the sister who slept at her sister’s house when Israeli threats made remaining at home too dangerous, and the relative who mourned alongside her family after her cousin’s wife and child were killed. She also left behind her own loved ones, including her husband and children, who now have to live with the absence created on 22 April. That part matters too. Because when someone like Amal is killed, the public inherits the photograph, the articles, the final assignment and the political arguments that follow. Her family inherits everything else: the empty chair, the phone that no longer rings, the familiar voice that suddenly exists only in recordings, the clothes and books and messages, the garden and the trees, and the unfinished plans. English artist Tom Young, who lives and works in Lebanon, knew Amal personally. She supported his work and wrote about his art for Al-Akhbar. After her death, he painted this portrait. Tom wrote: “Rest in Peace dear Amal Khalil, Lebanese journalist murdered by the IDF in South Lebanon on April 22nd 2026.” He remembered her as passionate about art and culture as well as politics, and as courageous, sensitive and kind. The portrait will be exhibited as part of the ongoing Roots/Revival exhibition at Hammam Al Jadeed in Saida, in the South she loved. There is something deeply fitting about that. Amal spent her life documenting a landscape repeatedly attacked by Israel. Now another artist has documented her, preserving a face against erasure and remembering a witness through another act of witnessing. Amal Khalil spent almost twenty years documenting South Lebanon. She knew what she believed and said it openly. She believed in resistance and understood the struggle against Zionism as part of the history of her people and her land. She refused to sanitise that history for anyone, refused to abandon the South and continued reporting after threats against her life. When asked what resistance meant to her, she left us the answer herself: “Resistance is our fate.” Her name was Amal Khalil. She was a journalist, a daughter of the South, a witness and a resistance journalist who refused to allow South Lebanon to be written about only by those bombing it. Rest in peace, Amal. Martyred 22 April 2026, South Lebanon.

Two watercolors of Palestinian Sunbirds (Cinnyris osea) by Roberto Prusso 1865 and John Gerrard Keulemans 1876 There is something extraordinary about the Palestinian sunbird, a creature so small, yet so deeply woven into the natural heritage of its homeland. The male is a jewel of shifting light, his iridescent plumage shimmering with emerald, violet and midnight blue, colours that reveal themselves as he moves beneath the sun. The female wears a quieter beauty, clothed in soft olive-brown and golden-grey, her colours drawn from the earth itself. Together, they raise their young in a delicate, suspended nest, intricately woven from grasses, fibres and spider silk. Within its fragile walls, tiny chicks begin their lives, dependent upon the devotion of their parents until they are ready to take their first uncertain flight. These little birds belong to the gardens, orchards, hillsides and flowering landscapes of Palestine. They move among blossoms, feeding on nectar and insects, playing their own quiet part in the intricate relationships that sustain the natural world. For Palestinians, the sunbird has become something more than a beautiful creature. It is a living emblem of belonging, a reminder that the identity of a land is carried not only in its people, its history and its ancient olive trees, but also in the smallest lives that inhabit it. And perhaps there is something especially moving about the sight of a mother and father tending their chicks beneath a Palestinian sky. A simple, universal act of love and continuity, unfolding in a land where so much life has been uprooted. Yet still, among the branches, nests are built. Eggs are laid. Young birds emerge into the light. For even the smallest wings carry the inheritance of a homeland.