‘Deliberate attack’: RT correspondent recounts surviving Israeli airstrike (VIDEO)
RT correspondent Steve Sweeney and his cameraman, Ali Rida Sbeity, have been injured in an Israeli strike while filming in southern Lebanon.
They said an Israeli aircraft fired a missile at their filming position near Al-Qasmiya Bridge, not far from a local military base.
Rida said Israeli forces “deliberately attacked” the crew despite their wearing uniforms displaying their press credentials.
Rida’s camera captured the moment of the strike as he filmed Sweeney’s report. The footage shows the missile hitting less than ten meters behind Sweeney as he ducks for cover.
Rida also shared footage of doctors removing shrapnel from Sweeney’s arm.
In a separate video, he said both he and Sweeney were fine, joking that “it turns out that when a missile is flying at you, you can hear it.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has condemned Israel over Thursday’s strike, saying the attack on journalists wearing press markings “cannot be called accidental given the killing of two hundred journalists in Gaza.”
“Especially since the rocket did not hit a ‘significant strategic military facility’, but rather the location where the report was being filmed,” she wrote on Telegram, adding that Moscow is “awaiting the response of international organizations.”
Sweeney later told Rick Sanchez on The Sanchez Effect that he was treated for shrapnel wounds to his arms. “I’m amazed that we survived. We were incredibly lucky to come away with the injuries we did,” the journalist said.
“This was a deliberate, targeted attack. There is no question about it,” Sweeney added.
Israeli armed forces are thought to have deliberately murdered hundreds of journalists reporting in Gaza and the West Bank over the past three years.
The incident comes amid Israel’s “limited and targeted” ground operations against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, launched on Monday after the group – which has close ties to Iran – carried out strikes on Israel following the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
On Wednesday, Israel explicitly threatened to target bridges in southern Lebanon. The military said it aimed to hit crossings over the Litani River to prevent Hezbollah from moving reinforcements and weapons south, and declared the area south of the Zahrani River a military zone, warning that any vehicle there could also be targeted.
Lebanese officials say more than 1 million people have been displaced by Israel’s ground offensive and airstrikes since the start of the month.
RT journalists have frequently been injured while covering major conflicts, particularly in Ukraine, including, most recently, correspondents Igor Zhdanov and Roman Kosarev, who were wounded in drone and artillery strikes while embedded with frontline units.
RT Arabic stringer Khaled Alkhateb, 25, was killed in 2017 while covering a Syrian government offensive against Islamic State. The network later established the Khaled Alkhateb International Memorial Awards for Best Journalism from a Conflict Zone in his honor.
