World

Calls for ‘war crime’ probe after Israeli strike in Lebanon killed three sisters and their grandmother travelling in car

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2 years ago

November 21, 2023

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There’s a makeshift shrine like none other outside the Ayoub family home in southern Lebanon.

Underneath a large picture of three little girls and their grandmother is a bright pink and white wreath of flowers.

But there are also black charred children’s shoes, a singed pencil case and blackened schoolbooks, with the edges of each page burnt.

There’s a section of what could be part of a car bonnet speckled with shrapnel holes sitting amongst two fluffy toy ducks and a pink teddy bear.

This is all that remains of an Israeli strike on the car carrying the three sisters, their mother and grandmother.

The family’s uncle Samir Ayoub is kneeling down in front of the shrine gathering up the scraps of burned school paper.

“I’m keeping them because there may be DNA on them, or blood or something that the international courts can use to prosecute the people who did this,” he says.

Latest updates: Premature babies ‘fighting serious conditions’ make it out of Gaza

He’s not the only one determined to get justice for what happened to his family. Human rights investigators are also gathering evidence to press for an independent criminal investigation into what they say is a war crime which took place on 5 November in Aynata in southern Lebanon.

“We found no evidence of any military target nearby,” says Ramzi Kaiss, from Human Rights Watch (HRW) in Lebanon.

He adds: “We have found this strike is unlawful because it violates the obligation that all parties should have to protect non-combatants.”

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF), known as the Israeli Occupying Force (IOF) in Lebanon, released drone footage on social media early on 6 November, the day after the strike.

The series of videos and stills of strikes that they posted appeared to indicate the attacks were in Gaza. There is no mention of Lebanon at all.

Among the grouping of hits, there was one video of an attack on a lone car moving along a road.

The Israeli military said at the time they had also hit a man called Jamal Musa who they say was responsible for the special security operations within Hamas.

It was not clear which strike they were referring to in the group of attacks they posted collectively on social media.

The Sky News Data and Forensics team managed to geolocate the footage to Lebanon – and the same road from Yarin to Aynata on which the family car containing the five women and girls had travelled.

Following our repeated requests for information and after multiple exchanges, the IDF then told us that it had hit what it called a “suspicious vehicle” with “several terrorists” inside but it is now investigating whether some ‘uninvolved civilians’ were also in the vehicle.

It did not give us any details about who the “several terrorists” might have been.

Ramzi Kaiss, from Human Rights Watch, says the admission by the IDF that it had carried out the strike indicated a “disrespect” for international humanitarian law.

The organisation insists that under humanitarian law, if there is any doubt, no attack should have been carried out and there needs to be evidence the target presents imminent danger.

HRW is now calling for international intervention and pressure to ensure humanitarian law is upheld.

“Israel on several occasions,” Kaiss says, “has failed to conduct credible investigations and hold individuals accountable for war crimes or other violations so Israel’s allies UK and US and others should press for accountability on this apparent war crime”.

The family of women and girls had decided they needed to finally leave their home on the southern border with Israel after weeks of slowly escalating attacks between Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese group, Hezbollah.

Many of their neighbours had already left the area for safer regions away from the border.

The family’s tragic journey

The Sky News team went on the same journey the family took with Samir Ayoub, their uncle and a journalist and political analyst from the Russian broadcaster RT.

He’s lived in Russia for 33 years but had returned to southern Lebanon to help his sister Samira relocate with her three grandchildren; 14-year-old Rames, Talin, aged 12 and 10-year-old Lee-Anne, as well as her daughter-in-law, the girls’ mother, Houda.

Samir was escorting them in a separate car from their home in Yareen. He told us on the way to meet them, he was held up because of constant bombings along the route.

When he met up with them, the family, travelling in two cars now, chose to stop at a corner shop in the village of Aynata to pick up some water and snacks before their journey to Beirut.

CCTV outside the shop shows them entering the shop and then Houda, the mother, and 10-year-old Lee-Anne leaving and loading water bottles into the back.

Samir can be seen emerging on the right-hand side of the CCTV picture to help them.

As the car pulls away, you can just about catch sight of a woman wearing a black hijab in the passenger front seat (which Samir says was where grandmother Samira was sitting while Houda was at the steering wheel) and little figures in the rear of the car seat showing the three little girls sitting behind them.

He says he drove off first, in his car and had them in his rear-view mirror for the next 1.7km (one mile). He had already turned the corner of the road when he heard a huge blast.

He stopped and went back and when he looked round the corner the car had been blown off the road and into the nearby field and was already burning.

He ran down and says he saw the girls in the back who appeared already dead along with his sister, their grandmother Samira.

Their mother Houda was half out of the car and Samir pulled her to safety. “I could see the children melting in the flames and all I wanted to do was try to stop their mother from seeing her own children burning,” he told us as we stood next to the incinerated vehicle wreck.

“She didn’t say help me, or rescue me,” he said. “She just said I want my kids, where are my kids, help me get them out of the car.”

Even as we spoke, an Israeli drone circled above us the entire time. Samir pointed upwards and told us: “They were watching us on the day of the attack.”

He adds: “I even told the girls to play around outside of the car before we set off so the drone would see the vehicle was only carrying children.”

Vehicle became an inferno

Pictures filmed by eyewitnesses show that after the strike, the car turned into an inferno.

One of the shopkeepers who’d seen the family before the attack says they’d seemed excited. When they heard the explosion, one of them raced to the scene because he recognised the location was in the vicinity of his own home.

Hassan Kawsan said the vehicle was already on fire when he arrived. He described how tried to put the flames out but the extinguisher wasn’t working properly.

By the time he returned with a functioning one, the vehicle was engulfed in flames.

That night, local television filmed Samir with his shirt still covered in blood after pulling Houda out of the vehicle.

He was shouting at the cameras, addressing the Israeli military: “Are these children terrorists?” he demanded to know.

He wants the International Criminal Court to investigate and is urging European countries to help to ensure someone is held accountable for what happened to his family.

The death of a Reuters reporter

Meanwhile, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has conducted an investigation into the death of Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah who was killed on 13 October, a few weeks before the girls and their grandmother – this time in Alma Shaab, Lebanon.

The group concluded the “targeted strike” came from the Israeli direction. “According to the ballistic analysis carried out by RSF, the shots came from the east of where the journalists were standing; from the direction of the Israeli border,” RSF said.

Jodie Ginsberg, from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), told Sky News: “We want to see an independent investigation into the killing of Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah in an attack which also severely injured several other journalists.

“A report by CPJ in May this year showed a decades-long pattern in which – prior to this latest war – at least 20 journalists have been killed by members of the Israel Defence Forces over the past 22 years and where no-one has ever been charged or held responsible for those deaths.

Journalists are civilians, not targets and those responsible for their killings must be held accountable.”

Referring to the incident in which Issam Abdallah was killed, an IDF statement said on the afternoon of 13 October, Hezbollah militants had launched attacks at several positions along the blue line, firing an anti-tank missile that struck the security fence of Israel near the community of Hanita.

The IDF said: “Immediately following the anti-tank missile launch, IDF soldiers suspected a terrorist infiltration into Israeli territory and, in response, used tank and artillery fire to prevent the infiltration.

“A report was received that during the incident, journalists were injured in the area. The incident is under review.”

Reporter’s friend speaks about incident for first time

We’ve spoken to one of Issam Abdallah’s close friends who was also working alongside him on the day.

Elie Brakhya, who is speaking about the incident publicly for the first time, is a veteran cameraman of numerous wars, including Ukraine, Syria, Yemen as well as Lebanon.

He tells us from his home in Beirut how the group of seven journalists had gone to the hilltop position in Alma Shaab on 13 October. The Israeli military and the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah have been trading fire across the border between the two countries since 7 October.

The group of journalists had gone to record the exchange of fire and were from a range of media outlets including Associated Press, AFP, Reuters and Al Jazeera, Elie’s employers. They were all clearly identifiable as media and were all wearing flak jackets and helmets marked with Press badges.

One of the vehicles parked right next to the group had press markings too. They positioned themselves where they could clearly be seen on the hilltop. “People could see us for miles around,” Elie says.

He says drones had been circulating for most of the time they were there as well as Israeli Apache helicopters. Several of the group had done live broadcasts from the position and they’d been there for more than an hour.

Issam had posted on his social media account, wearing his press-marked body armour. Elie took a selfie of the two friends together, again wearing their press-marked body armour.

“It was the last picture of the two of us,” he says. The group of journalists, he says, was relaxed and just going about their work when the strike hit.

“There was no whistle of anything coming from behind us,” Elie says. “We are experienced but not experts but it felt like it came from in front and above us.

“I saw straight away Issam was dead,” he adds. “He took the direct hit.”

Several of the journalists were badly injured and the friends raced around trying to help each other. Live streams of several cameras recorded the blast and the immediate reaction.

One, a young journalist from AFP, can be heard on camera shouting she couldn’t feel her legs. They feared a quick second strike, so time was precious. “There’s always a second strike,” Elie says. He ran to his vehicle to try to locate some tourniquets to help his colleagues when the second strike happened just in front of his vehicle.

The whole of his left side was hit by the blast and he feared he’d lost his shoulder entirely.

“When I looked I couldn’t see my shoulder,” he says. The helmet he was wearing was blown off entirely and his left ear was rendered deaf immediately.

On his right hand, his thumb was blown off and he remembers gathering it up and holding it to his body.

His legs had been showered with dozens of shrapnel and he couldn’t move. He realised he was under his car which was already burning. “Then someone pulled me out from under the vehicle and I just saw it burst into flames,” he tells us.

When Elie’s friends later visited him in hospital, they apologised to him because he was so covered in blood they didn’t recognise him at the time and thought they were pulling a corpse from under the vehicle.

He checked the timecodes on his camera later and found there were 37 seconds between the two strikes.

“We were targeted, for certain,” he says. “There’s no chance we weren’t. Everyone could see us with our row of five tripods for miles.”

Lebanon blames Israel for double attack

The Lebanese military, which carried out an investigation into the incident, the Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati and Reporters Without Borders agree with him and blame the Israelis for the double attack.

“We’re not kids. We are professionals. We know what we are doing and what to do and where to go. This is our job,” Elie says.

“We know there are dangers. Of course, there’s a price you have to pay… we are paying our share but there’s a responsibility about this and there are international laws which should protect us.”

Astonishingly he says this was the second attack within a few weeks that he and his team have come under in Lebanon. Nobody was hurt in the first instance.

In a third attack on journalists (which he was not involved in), again the cameras were rolling live while a group of journalists in Yaroun on the southern border with Israel broadcast.

Again, it was a double hit with seconds to spare. Despite vehicles being set alight, remarkably only one of the group was injured.

The Lebanese authorities have said they intend to file a complaint with the UN Security Council over what they call Issam’s “deliberate killing” by Israel.

Lebanon’s National News Agency says the foreign ministry has instructed Lebanon’s permanent mission to the UN to submit a complaint.

These acts, the agency attributed to the foreign ministry, “constitute a blatant attack and a crime against freedom of opinion and the press, human rights, and international humanitarian law, by easily killing unarmed journalists who are victims of their desire to convey the truth, defend it with the lenses of their cameras and pens, and transfer them to the tape of the repeated Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon”.

World

Salisbury novichok poisonings: Putin ‘morally responsible’ for woman’s death after authorising botched spy assassination bid

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2 hours ago

December 4, 2025

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Salisbury novichok poisonings: Putin 'morally responsible' for woman's death after authorising botched spy assassination bid

The assassination attempt on a former Russian spy was authorised by Vladimir Putin, who is “morally responsible” for the death of a woman poisoned by the nerve agent used in the attack, a public inquiry has found.

The chairman, Lord Hughes, found there were “failings” in the management of Sergei Skripal, 74, who was a member of Russian military intelligence, the GRU, before coming to the UK in 2010 on a prisoner exchange after being convicted of spying for Britain.

But he found the assessment that he wasn’t at “significant risk” of assassination was not “unreasonable” at the time of the attack in Salisbury on 4 March 2018, which could only have been avoided by hiding him with a completely new identity.

Mr Skripal and his daughter Yulia, 41, who was also poisoned, were left seriously ill, along with then police officer Nick Bailey, who was sent to search their home, but they all survived.

Dawn Sturgess, 44, died on 8 July, just over a week after unwittingly spraying herself with novichok given to her by her partner, Charlie Rowley, 52, in a perfume bottle in nearby Amesbury on 30 June 2018. Mr Rowley was left seriously ill but survived.

In his 174-page report, following last year’s seven-week inquiry, costing more than £8m, former Supreme Court judge Lord Hughes said she received “entirely appropriate” medical care but her condition was “unsurvivable” from a very early stage.

The inquiry found GRU officers using the aliases Alexander Petrov, 46, and Ruslan Boshirov, 47, had brought the Nina Ricci bottle containing the novichok to Salisbury after arriving in London from Moscow with a third agent known as Sergey Fedotov to kill Mr Skripal on 2 March.

The report said it was likely the same bottle Petrov and Boshirov used to apply the military-grade nerve agent to the handle of Mr Skripal’s front door before it was “recklessly discarded”.

“They can have had no regard to the hazard thus created, of the death of, or serious injury to, an uncountable number of innocent people,” it said.

It is “impossible to say” where Mr Rowley found the bottle, but was likely within a few days of it being abandoned on 4 March, meaning there is “clear causative link” with the death of mother-of-three Ms Sturgess.

Lord Hughes said he was sure the three GRU agents “were acting on instructions”, adding: “I have concluded that the operation to assassinate Sergei Skripal must have been authorised at the highest level, by President Putin.

“I therefore conclude that those involved in the assassination attempt (not only Petrov, Boshirov and Fedotov, but also those who sent them, and anyone else giving authorisation or knowing assistance in Russia or elsewhere) were morally responsible for Dawn Sturgess’s death,” he said.

Russian ambassador summonsed

After the publication of the report, the government announced the GRU has been sanctioned in its entirety, and the Russian Ambassador has been summonsed to the Foreign Office to answer for Russia’s ongoing campaign of alleged hostile activity against the UK.

Sir Keir Starmer said the findings “are a grave reminder of the Kremlin’s disregard for innocent lives” and that Ms Sturgess’s “needless” death was a tragedy that “will forever be a reminder of Russia’s reckless aggression”.

“The UK will always stand up to Putin’s brutal regime and call out his murderous machine for what it is,” the prime minister said.

He said deploying the “highly toxic nerve agent in a busy city centre was an astonishingly reckless act” with an “entirely foreseeable” risk that others beyond the intended target would be killed or injured.

The inquiry heard a total of 87 people presented at A&E.

Lord Hughes said there was a decision taken not to issue advice to the public not to pick anything up which they hadn’t dropped, which was a “reasonable conclusion” at the time, so as not to cause “widespread panic”.

He also said there had been no need for training beyond specialist medics before the “completely unexpected use of a nerve agent in an English city”.

After the initial attack, wider training was “appropriate” and was given but should have been more widely circulated.

In a statement following the publication of his report, Lord Hughes said Ms Sturgess’s death was “needless and arbitrary”, while the circumstances are “clear but quite extraordinary”.

“She was the entirely innocent victim of the cruel and cynical acts of others,” he said.

‘We can have Dawn back now’

Speaking after the report was published, Ms Sturgess’s father, Stanley Sturgess, said: “We can have Dawn back now. She’s been public for seven years. We can finally put her to peace.”

In a statement, her family said they felt “vindicated” by the report, which recognised how Wiltshire police wrongly characterised Ms Sturgess as a drug user.

But they said: “Today’s report has left us with some answers, but also a number of unanswered questions.

“We have always wanted to ensure that what happened to Dawn will not happen to others; that lessons should be learned and that meaningful changes should be made.

“The report contains no recommendations. That is a matter of real concern. There should, there must, be reflection and real change.”

Wiltshire Police Chief Constable Catherine Roper admitted the pain of Ms Sturgess’s family was “compounded by mistakes made” by the force, adding: “For this, I am truly sorry.”

Russia has denied involvement

The Russian Embassy has firmly denied any connection between Russia and the attack on the Skripals.

But the chairman dismissed Russia’s explanation that the Salisbury and Amesbury poisonings were the result of a scheme devised by the UK authorities to blame Russia, and the claims of Petrov and Borisov in a television interview that they were sightseeing.

The inquiry chairman said the evidence of a Russian state attack was “overwhelming” and was designed not only as a revenge attack against Mr Skripal, but amounted to a “public statement” that Russia “will act decisively in its own interests”.

Lord Hughes found “some features of the management” of Mr Skripal “could and should have been improved”, including insufficient regular written risk assessments.

But although there was “inevitably” some risk of harm at Russia’s hands, the analysis that it was not likely was “reasonable”, he said.

“There is no sufficient basis for concluding that there ought to have been assessed to be an enhanced risk to him of lethal attack on British soil, such as to call for security measures,” such as living under a new identity or at a secret address, the chairman said.

He added that CCTV cameras, alarms or hidden bugs inside Mr Skripal’s house might have been possible but wouldn’t have prevented the “professionally mounted attack with a nerve agent”.

Sky News has approached the Russian Embassy for comment on the report.

World

Ukraine has become Europe’s war – so why doesn’t it act like it?

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2 hours ago

December 4, 2025

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Ukraine has become Europe's war - so why doesn't it act like it?

Something concrete and unarguable has emerged from the diplomatic turbulence generated by Donald Trump’s attempts to end the war in Ukraine.

The war in Ukraine has become Europe’s war – in fact, it is unlikely to be America’s problem for long.

The Trump administration’s 20-something-point peace plan, as shepherded by envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, is going nowhere.

When presented with the proposal on Tuesday, a Russian negotiator said President Putin made, “no secret of our critical and even negative attitude toward a number of elements.”

But the words of the Russian leader himself are more instructive. In a belligerent speech made on the same day, he threatened to “cut Ukraine off from the sea entirely” in retaliation to a series of attacks on Russian-linked oil tankers.

This is not a man thinking about doing a deal. Putin is the obvious obstacle.

None of which will have come as any surprise to leaders in Europe and the UK, who did what they typically do when the situation looks grim.

Britain, France, Ireland, Germany and others have been issuing lofty declarations of the “we’ll support Ukraine as long as it takes,” variety.

But this time it is different. European leaders are going to have to treat Ukraine like the emergency it is – or face the consequences.

Presently, they occupy a position that many see as absurd.

Europe, including Britain, bankroll the Ukrainian government. Funding which was split down the middle with the Biden administration has been assumed by Europe in full. Furthermore, the Europeans pay for all American weaponry through a NATO facility called PURL.

Thus, Europe has got skin in the game – they are paying the bills. But where are they sitting at the negotiation table?

They are not there at all. The Russians do not want them, and the US does not seem particularly keen. When US secretary of state Marco Rubio met a Ukrainian delegation to discuss the peace plan in Geneva, he said he did not know anything about European counter-proposals

“It’s extraordinary that Europe is picking up the bill but struggles to make itself heard,” says Marc De Vore, of St Andrews University. “It shows the lack of vision, coordination and leadership across the continent.”

The former foreign minister of Lithuania, Gabrielius Landsbergis, is utterly exasperated by Europe’s ineffectiveness.

“If you are a European leader asking your team to book you on the next flight to Washington to go talk to daddy, please don’t. Not without a plan, not cap in hand, not humiliating us all in front of the cameras at the Oval Office.

“Europe is our continent, our future is decided here, not there. We aren’t poor, we have options, we can finally decide to assist Ukraine to the full extent…”

This frustration is shared by the Ukrainians, who have begun to use a different word to describe this relationship – betrayal.

Inna Sovsun is an MP in the Ukrainian parliament. Her husband, a combat medic, is serving at the front.

“People on the frontline feel really disappointed with the whole situation, and it does feel like betrayal.

“The challenge is much bigger than which village will be controlled by whom in Donbas. It is about, what does the future of civilisation look like? Does Russia’s barbaric version win? If you are not willing to fight for that, those values aren’t worth much, are they?”

Unsurprisingly perhaps, analysts and others are sketching out what Ukraine would look like if forced to capitulate. The idea here, is that Europe will not like what it sees.

Picture an unstable nation on Europe’s border with a proxy-Russian leader – or different groups battling for control. The population is restive, with many thousands of men both conditioned and traumatised by war. Millions of refugees seek shelter in Europe.

Economists have tried to put a figure on such scenarios, with one group estimating costs to Europe approaching €3tn euros in additional defence and refugee-related spending if Ukraine is seriously weakened.

For the Europeans, a test of their resolve is already at hand. The EU must agree on a plan to seize up to €210bn euros in frozen Russian assets as a means of funding the cash-strapped government in Kyiv.

The issue is legally contentious, with countries like Belgium, where much of the money is held, fretting about liability. But the Ukrainians see it as a simple question of commitment.

“Given what is at stake, there just has to be stronger political will. That is what is difficult for us to grasp. (They) say all those good things, the right things, but that doesn’t really matter much,” says Ms Sovsun.

World

Anti-Hamas militia leader Yasser Abu Shabab killed in Gaza Strip – reports

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2 hours ago

December 4, 2025

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Anti-Hamas militia leader Yasser Abu Shabab killed in Gaza Strip - reports

A Palestinian anti-Hamas militia leader has been killed in the Gaza Strip, according to Israeli army radio.

Yasser Abu Shabab, the commander of the former looting gang Popular Forces, along with a large number of members from his group, and senior commander Ghassan al Duhine, reportedly fell into a well-planned ambush set by the resistance factions.

The Reuters news agency reported that Abu Shabab, the most prominent anti-Hamas clan leader in Gaza, had died of his wounds in a hospital in southern Israel. It did not say when he died.

Hamas had no comment, its Gaza spokesperson said, while Israeli authorities did not immediately make any comment.

Hamas has accused Abu Shabab of collaborating with Israel, which he denied.

Sky News revealed that Abu Shabab’s Bedouin militia was smuggling vehicles into Gaza with the help of the Israeli military and an Arab-Israeli car dealer.

Popular Forces has been positioning itself as Gaza’s future government, despite denials in June that Abu Shabab had any intention of forming a government in Gaza.

The militia said at the time that he was focused solely on providing security to aid convoys and Palestinians.

Speaking to Sky News, however, Hassan Abu Shabab, a relative and childhood friend of Yasser Abu Shabab, showed no such restraint – he talked of reforming the school curriculum and holding a referendum on normalising relations with Israel.

“We’d like to run everything,” he said.

Looting trucks and smuggling cigarettes

He said in October that the recruitment of new militias had swelled Popular Forces’ troops across Gaza to around 3,000.

The headquarters of the militia are located in a small neighbourhood in Gaza’s southern Rafah area, in territory still held by Israeli forces.

The base’s location is strategically important – it sits along the route by which aid trucks must travel when entering Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing, a route that aid officials have named “Looters’ Alley”.

An internal UN report, dated November 2024, identified Abu Shabab and his gang as “the most influential stakeholders behind the systematic and massive looting of convoys”.

The UN document identified their primary source of income as smuggling cigarettes – one of the many goods which Israel has officially banned from entering Gaza. The price of individual cigarettes has at some points reached $20.

Hassan Abu Shabab admitted that the group was involved in looting trucks and smuggling cigarettes, though he said they only ever targeted commercial trucks they believed to be supplying Hamas.

He said it eventually escalated, with Hamas’s men allegedly killing his cousins in a “massacre” that left 54 people dead.

Sky News could not independently verify his claim, but there were numerous reports of deadly clashes between Abu Shabab’s men and Hamas, which declared the Popular Forces leader a wanted man.