Category World News

The NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) has urged Lebanon to continue its pursuit of justice over a deadly Israeli strike two years ago that killed a Reuters journalist and wounded six other reporters.

The rights group said in a statement on Monday that it welcomed a move by Lebanon’s Ministry of Justice to investigate legal options to press charges against Israel for crimes against journalists.

Reporters Without Borders also welcomed that “Lebanon is finally taking action” as Israel is accused of targeting a large number of journalists during its military aggression in Gaza and Lebanon.

Issam Abdallah, a videographer for the Reuters news agency, was killed in the October 13, 2023, attack by an Israeli tank on southern Lebanon near the Israeli border. Two Al Jazeera reporters were among those injured.

HRW said Lebanon’s announcement last week that it was looking at legal options to pursue the matter presented a “fresh opportunity to achieve justice for the victims”.

Ramzi Kaiss, the NGO’s Lebanon researcher, said the country’s action to hold Israel accountable is overdue.

“Israel’s apparently deliberate killing of Issam Abdallah should have served as a crystal clear message for Lebanon’s government that impunity for war crimes begets more war crimes,” he said.

“Since Issam’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,” Kaiss asserted.

‘War crime’

The October 2023 attack wounded Al Jazeera cameraman Elie Brakhia and reporter Carmen Joukhadar, Reuters journalists Thaer Al-Sudani and Maher Nazeh, and the AFP news agency’s Christina Assi and Dylan Collins.

Assi was seriously wounded and had to have her right leg amputated.

HRW said an investigation by the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) had found that an Israeli Merkava tank had fired two 120mm rounds at the group of clearly identifiable journalists.

The journalists were removed from the hostilities and had been stationary for more than an hour when they came under fire, the report said. No exchange of fire had been recorded across the border for more than 40 minutes before the attack.

The NGO said it had found no evidence of a military target near the journalists’ location and, because the incident appeared to be a deliberate attack on civilians, it constituted a war crime.

‘Premeditated, targeted attack’

Morris Tidball-Binz, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said on Friday that the attack was “a premeditated, targeted and double-tapped attack from the Israeli forces, a clear violation, in my opinion, of [international humanitarian law], a war crime”.

Reporters Without Borders urged Beirut to refer the case to the International Criminal Court, saying on Friday: “Lebanon is finally taking action against impunity for the crime.”

United States President Donald Trump will oversee a formal peace deal between Cambodia and Thailand on the sidelines of an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit, according to Malaysian Foreign Minister Mohamad Hasan.

Trump will visit the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur on October 26 to witness the agreement, Hasan told reporters.

“During the summit, we hope to see the signing of a declaration known as the Kuala Lumpur Accord between these two neighbours to ensure peace and a lasting ceasefire,” he said.

The 47th ASEAN Summit is due to take place in Kuala Lumpur from October 26 to 28, bringing together heads of state from 10 Southeast Asian nations and other dialogue partners.

Before the announcement on Tuesday, it was unclear whether the US president would, in fact, attend this year’s ASEAN summit. Trump has been similarly non-committal about whether he will attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in South Korea the following weekend.

US news outlet Politico reported last week that Trump’s participation at ASEAN was contingent on whether the bloc would hold an official ceasefire ceremony with him at the helm.

Trump also reportedly requested that Chinese officials not join the ceremony, Politico said, although China and Malaysia also played a major role in the ceasefire negotiations between Thailand and Cambodia.

Trump has instead largely taken credit for ending the five-day conflict in July that killed at least 43 people and displaced more than 300,000, in a dispute over unmarked sections of the Thai-Cambodian border.

The border spans more than 800km (500 miles) and is an ongoing area of dispute that has led to violent confrontations between Cambodia and Thailand in the past.

Despite the ceasefire, clashes persisted into September along a disputed segment of the border.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet earlier this year nominated Trump for the Nobel Prize for his role in negotiating the deal and “in recognition of his historic contributions in advancing world peace”.

Trump’s attitude towards the Thai-Cambodian border conflict mirror his actions in the Middle East, where he took credit for a ceasefire deal this week between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Here is how things stand on Tuesday, October 14, 2025:

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he will travel to Washington, DC, to meet his US counterpart, Donald Trump, on Friday. The main topics to be discussed will be air defence and long-range capabilities, Zelenskyy said in a message on his Telegram channel. Trump has said he is considering providing Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk missiles (with a range of 2,500km or 1,550 miles), which would give Kyiv the capability to strike deep inside Russia.
• Zelenskyy said he held talks in Kyiv with the European Union’s foreign affairs chief, Kaja Kallas. The two discussed how to increase pressure on Moscow via new sanctions, the use of Russian frozen assets to fund a reparation loan to Ukraine and the country’s path to EU membership.
• Kallas announced the allocation of 10 million euros ($11.5m) to set up a special tribunal to try Russia’s leadership for the crime of aggression. Often called the “mother of all crimes” in international criminal law, aggression is committed when military force is used against another state illegally.
• The EU’s top diplomat also said she would present a roadmap for European defence, including strengthening anti-drone systems, this week. The announcement comes following a surge of Russian hybrid attacks against European countries. “It is clear that we need to toughen our defence against Russia. Not to provoke war, but the opposite, to prevent war,” Kallas said.
• The mayor of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, Ihor Terekhov, has said Russian forces struck the city with guided aerial bombs on Monday night, knocking out power in at least three districts and hitting a hospital.
• Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its forces destroyed 40 Ukrainian drones, the majority over the Belgorod and Voronezh regions. It also reported that Russian troops captured the village of Borivska Andriyivka in the Kharkiv region and Moskovske in Donetsk. Russian forces also advanced deeper into the residential areas of the eastern districts of Myrnohrad.