"This incident will continue to be examined by the General Staff's Fact Finding and Assessment Mechanism, which is an independent, expert body, responsible for examining exceptional events that take place during war," it said in a statement. 13 near Hanita with artillery and tank fire to remove the threat, and subsequently received a report that journalists had been injured. In response to Reuters questions about the TNO report, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it responded to attacks from Lebanese militants Hezbollah on Oct. Neither of the two surviving Reuters reporters or another AFP journalist at the scene remembered the machine gun fire.
Reuters could not independently determine if the Israeli tank crew knew it was firing on journalists, nor whether it also shot at them with a machine gun and, if so, why. "The latter cannot be concluded with certainty as the direction and exact distance of (the machine gun) fire could not be established." "It is considered a likely scenario that a Merkava tank, after firing two tank rounds, also used its machine gun against the location of the journalists," TNO's report said. In its final report on Thursday, the institute revealed that audio picked up by an Al Jazeera video camera at the scene showed the reporters also came under fire from 0.50 calibre rounds of the type used by the Browning machine guns that can be mounted on Israel's Merkava tanks. The first shell killed Abdallah, 37, and severely wounded Agence France-Presse (AFP) photographer Christina Assi, 28.Ī Reuters investigation in December covered TNO's preliminary finding that a tank in Israel had fired at the journalists.