Before I went to Lebanon, I was watching Courtney Bonneaux's posts on Instagram. She's a reporter,

an independent reporter, who's been living in southern Lebanon for the past 18 months,

posting almost daily videos from villages destroyed by the Israeli army. She's an American from Boston, who doesn't really look or sound like a reporter, but she stands in the United army. She's an American from Boston who doesn't really look or sound like a reporter,

but she stands in front of the camera with a rubbleized building in the background and says where she is

and how the building was destroyed and how many civilians were killed, and then shows a list of other villages bombed by Israel on that day and how many

civilians were killed there, and then reminds everyone that these are all war crimes. To me,

this is reporting. She shows up and tries to explain what is happening and why. That's what I

wanted to do. That's why I went to Lebanon.

And a few days after I got there, I ran into Courtney by chance in Beirut, a stroke of luck.

She said she'd just come to Beirut and was heading back to the south, and I said, I was trying

to get there. Maybe we can meet up

in a few days and talk, and she said, okay. And then, a few days later, on April 22nd,

Courtney's friend and colleague, reporter Amal Khalil, was targeted and killed by the Israeli

defense forces. It was a big story covered around the world.

I wrote to Courtney asking if she wanted to talk about this on tape,

and she said yes, definitely.

So we met at a hotel in the city of Tyre,

the day after Amal's funeral. There's some things I need to explain before I play

the interview. One is that there are actually a lot of reporters covering the war in southern Lebanon,

and they're all local southern Lebanese, mainly young, mainly women, and they all communicate

and share information on a WhatsApp group chat.

This, in my experience, is very unusual. They all work for different news agencies, but they don't

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