A video of Makan Nasiri has been shared over and over on social media in recent weeks. It starts off with vignettes familiar to so many parents: a young child opening the door to be surprised by a birthday cake, then walking with friends, then dancing joyfully with an older relative. Halfway through, though, there’s a sharp transition. Nasiri was a student at Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in…
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On April 17, Zahra al-Qusaybi woke up to news of a ceasefire in Lebanon. For six weeks, she and her two adult daughters had languished in a crowded school shelter in Saida, a city 27 miles south of the capital Beirut. They were among 1.1 million people uprooted from their homes when Israel escalated its war on Lebanon on March 2, ostensibly to disarm the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
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With the escalation of shelling in southern Lebanon since early March 2026, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese once again find themselves in a cycle of forced displacement. Official estimates indicate that more than 1 million people were forced to leave their homes within just the first few weeks, marking one of the fastest waves of displacement the country has experienced in decades.
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Syrian journalist Oudai Efnikher is deeply familiar with life under Israeli occupation. He was born in Kafer Hareb, a village in Syria’s Golan Heights, from which he and his family were expelled after Israel seized the territory during the 1967 Six-Day War. Now he is once again facing down Israeli forces, as they “take our land, kill our crops, and abduct our fathers.” “This is a slow…
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Sharif Abdel Kouddous has reported from war zones and disaster areas across the world—from Egypt, Syria, and Libya, to Iraq, Algeria, Haiti, and the United States—but nothing compares to what he’s seen in Gaza. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Abdel Kouddous about the impossible task of documenting the full scale of devastation Israel has wrought on Gaza and, increasingly, on Lebanon.
Guests:
Sharif Abdel Kouddous is a journalist and editor for DropSite News based in New York and Cairo. He has reported from across the Arab world, including Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Bahrain, and Algeria as well from across the United States and internationally. He received a George Polk Award for his investigation into the killing of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, an Emmy award for his coverage of the Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban, and an Izzy Award for his coverage of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
Additional links/info:
Sharif Abdel Kouddous, DropSite author page
Kavitha Chekuru & Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Fault Lines, “The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza”
Credits:
Producer: Rosette Sewali
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino
Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Dropsite’s editor for the Middle East and North Africa. He’s based in New York and in Cairo and has reported from across the globe, in the Arab world, including Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Bahrain, and Algeria, as well as from across
This article was originally published by Truthout on April 23, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
Israeli forces killed journalist Amal Khalil and wounded her colleague, Zeinab Faraj, on Wednesday, firing multiple strikes on the journalists in southern Lebanon in Israel’s latest attack on journalists covering its violence across the region.
Khalil and Faraj were taking cover in a nearby house after an Israeli strike near their car, while they were out reporting on an Israeli strike on another vehicle. While at the house, Khalil reached out to family and Lebanese officials, notifying them of her location, but Israeli forces bombed the house, collapsing it.
Rescuers pulled Faraj from the wreckage, but Israeli forces fired at emergency workers trying to reach Khalil, delaying her rescue, according to Lebanese officials. Khalil’s body was only recovered hours later from the rubble.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces also fired, for a third time, on the ambulance transporting Faraj to the hospital, Lebanese media reported, in an incident described by critics as the Israeli forces “hunting her down.” Faraj underwent surgery at the hospital and was brought to stable condition.
Khalil was a veteran reporter for the Al-Akhbar newspaper. The left-wing journalist was raised under Israeli occupation in the 1980s in southern Lebanon, and was driven by a desire to chronicle daily life in south Lebanon under constant threat of Israeli invasion and bombardment.
“On a personal level, resistance means everything to me,” Khalil said in an interview, translated from Arabic, with The Public Source last year. “Through my work, I have tried to be in solidarity with these people — the people of the land.”
Khalil was also an animal lover, and devoted her free time