"Journacide: The War on Truth." New Film Investigates Israel's Killing of Reporters in Lebanon

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I’m Amy Goodman. We are broadcasting from Belfast in the North of Ireland. Here at Docs Ireland, the film about Democracy Now! , Steal This Story, Please! , premiered last night at the Queen’s cinema here in Belfast on the first night of the film festival.

We turn now to Lebanon, where an Israeli drone on Monday struck a journalist with the Iranian outlet Press TV while he was reporting from southern Lebanon. Hadi Hoteit was reporting on camera at the time of the attack.

HADI HOTEIT : I’m in the center of Kafr Tebnit right now, the entrance of Kafr Tebnit from this side. An artillery strike just targeted the area behind me, as you can see. There is heavy drone activity in the vicinity. And, of course, the destruction, the amount of destruction, is very strong. There is — the Israelis did try to destroy the entire area.

AMY GOODMAN : The journalist Hadi Hoteit survived the attack but was hit by six pieces of shrapnel.

Over 260 journalists and media workers have been killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7th, 2023. With Israel’s latest and ongoing assault on Lebanon, the death toll of journalists there has reached 29.

Irish filmmaker Seán Murray investigated the killings of four of those journalists. On March 28th, journalists Ali Shoeib and brother and sister Fatima and Mohamed Ftouni were killed, all together, in an Israeli drone strike on their car. On April 22nd, Amal Khalil was injured in an airstrike and died from her injuries after waiting for hours inside a bombed building as rescuers awaited clearance from Israeli forces to reach her. Seán Murray’s new feature documentary, premiering here in Belfast at Docs Ireland, is called Journacide: The War on Truth . This is a clip from the trailer.

SEÁN MURRAY : This is not a film about war, but rather a decree to bear witness. It’s a film about friendship, love and the indomitable will of the human spirit. As Lebanon burns, silence has now become the greatest weapon of oppression. This is a tale of those that fought different, the story of the gatekeepers of truth.

AMY GOODMAN : That’s a clip from the film Journacide: The War on Truth by director Seán Murray, who joins us here in the Belfast studio.

Seán, it’s great to have you with us. Very painful times. You know, we started with this latest targeting of a journalist, Hadi Hoteit in Lebanon. You knew him?

SEÁN MURRAY : Yeah, well, Hadi Hoteit works for Press TV. I think, inadvertently, that Hadi is maybe featured in the documentary. He was there in Sour, which is Tyre, in the media compound when I was there, as you’ll see in the film. But yeah, he’s just one of many who have to live with the targeting every day in Lebanon.

AMY GOODMAN : So, talk about your film and why you chose to call it Journacide .

SEÁN MURRAY : Well, I think Journacide effectively gives the explicit nature of the targeting and killing of journalists. I think that it fits perfectly. I think we — not only do we see the targeting of journalists, but it’s the double-tap strikes that we see with the Gaza doctrine, that is now being applied in Lebanon. So, in the case of Ali, Fatima and Mohamed, the original strike killed Ali and Mohamed, and it was a double tap then that killed Fatima, Mohamed’s sister, in the second strike. So, this is a deliberate targeting of journalists. The reasons behind that is to, of course, silence what is happening in Lebanon, the ethnic cleansing that’s going on, the mass war crimes that’s being committed. But Lebanon is a little bit different. Israel does not have the geographical repressive abilities that they did in Gaza. And we see that now playing out, and hopefully we see this week that something might be changing, or we’ll see the ceasefire. All we could do is hope.

AMY GOODMAN : I want to go to a clip of Ali Shoeib. I’m going to see if we have it.

ALI SHOEIB : [translated] Because the whole event now revolves around us, I film myself, since the photographer who was accompanying me day and night for months has now become a martyr. I miss him, just as I miss my colleagues at Al Mayadeen, the martyrs Mohammad Reda and Ghassan Najjar. In this place, the martyrs fell this dawn. This was an area dedicated solely to journalists’ accommodation. Here, we used to live. We would leave in the morning for the front and return in the evening to this place, a place that everyone now knows is being dedicated to journalists. The Israeli enemy carried out a raid at dawn with its warplanes on this place. It destroyed several accommodation facilities. It killed three martyrs, and a number of journalists were wounded. There are no weapons here, no military presence and no one affiliated with the military.

AMY GOODMAN : “And no one affiliated with the military,” Ali Shoeib says. Talk about what happened to him, and then how the Israeli military tried to destroy his rep…