Footage circulating from southern Lebanon shows the exact moment an Israeli airstrike struck just meters from Al-Manar correspondent Ali Shabib and his cameraman while they were broadcasting live from Nabatieh overnight. Shabib was wounded in the blast and evacuated to a hospital, according to reports from the network and independent outlets covering the incident. The strike hit while the crew remained on location in an area where Israeli forces were actively carrying out operations, and the video has since spread widely online, drawing attention to how close the journalists came to being killed rather than merely injured.

According to the Israeli military, the strikes in the Nabatieh area came in response to two explosive drones launched overnight by Hezbollah toward Israeli troops stationed near the Ali Taher Ridge inside the security zone in southern Lebanon. Israel's military said no casualties resulted among its own forces from that drone attack. In answer, Israeli aircraft reportedly struck several sites tied to Hezbollah infrastructure across multiple locations in the south, including what was described as a weapons storage facility, and it was during this wave of strikes that the blast landed near the Al-Manar crew.

Al-Manar is widely known as Hezbollah's affiliated television network, and its reporters routinely operate in areas where the group maintains an active military presence, often broadcasting from the edges of ongoing confrontations between Hezbollah and Israeli forces. That affiliation has made Al-Manar journalists a recurring flashpoint in this conflict, with Israel in past incidents accusing individual reporters from the network of holding roles beyond journalism, while press freedom organizations and Lebanese officials have pushed back hard against those claims, arguing that media affiliation does not strip journalists of protections under international law. Whether Monday night's strike specifically targeted the crew or landed near them as a byproduct of the broader strikes on Hezbollah sites has not been independently confirmed, and neither Israel nor Al-Manar has offered a detailed accounting of intent.

The incident adds to a longer, grimmer pattern this year, with several journalists working for Hezbollah-linked or Hezbollah-friendly outlets having been killed in Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon amid the ongoing conflict. Each of those cases has followed a similar script: Israel citing alleged militant ties to justify the strike, and Lebanese officials along with international press watchdogs condemning the deaths as attacks on journalism itself. Shabib's injury, caught live on camera, is likely to reignite that same debate, even as the underlying facts of exactly what was being targeted in Monday night's strike remain unclear.