AFP camera operator Dylan Collins speaks on a mobile phone after being wounded by Israeli shelling in the village of Alma al-Shaab, bordering Israel, in southern Lebanon, October 13, 2023. An Israeli shell hit a gathering of international journalists covering border clashes in southern Lebanon, killing one person and wounding six others.
Hasan Ammar/AP
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Dylan Collins stood on an exposed hilltop in southern Lebanon and filmed a plume of smoke near the Israeli border.
It was October 2023, less than a week after Hamas launched a massive attack from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel. In a show of solidarity with Palestinian militants in Gaza, the Lebanese militia Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel from the north.
Collins and six other journalists followed military activity along the Lebanese-Israeli border. Mostly it was quiet.
“We all wear bulletproof vests and helmets,” recalls Collins, 37, an American cameraman for the Agence France Presse (AFP) news agency. “It says PRESS… right there on your chest.”
Collins had his live video broadcast stood up and was writing a message to a colleague when the first Israeli tank shell fell.
“There was a big, big explosion,” Collins recalls. “My colleague Christina was behind me and I just heard her voice, she was screaming.”
“What's happened?” shouted Christina Assi, a Lebanese photo editor at AFP. “I can’t feel my legs!”
Shrapnel shattered her right calf. Collins ran over and placed a tourniquet on her leg to try to stop the bleeding.
That's when the second tank shell landed. Double tap.
“It hit an Al Jazeera car,” Collins recalls. “The car exploded. She was probably six feet away from me.”
An Al Jazeera vehicle burns after it was hit by Israeli shelling in the Alma al-Shaab border village with Israel, southern Lebanon, October 13, 2023.
Hasan Ammar/AP
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Collins was hit by shrapnel in his head, arms and torso. Assi lost her right leg below the knee. Issam AbdallahReuters cameraman was killed.
Collins lives in Lebanon but calls Vermont her home in the United States. For the past two years, he has been demanding some accountability from the Israeli and US governments. Which Israeli military officer fired from a tank at a group of journalists? Why?
The Israeli government told NPR that “the incident is still under investigation,” but Collins says he was never contacted by Israeli officials. He met with the State Department and the FBI, but to no avail.
Earlier this month, Collins flew in from Lebanon to reiterate his demands at a news conference with members of Congress outside the U.S. Capitol.
“As an American, I thought I would find support,” Collins said. “I thought my government would fight for me.”
There is no doubt about where the tank shells came from. Committee to Protect Journalists notes that various international organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Reuters and AFP all concluded that Israel carried out a deliberate attack on the seven journalists.
Collins says there was no way the Israelis would mistake them for combatants. Human Rights Watch hired experts to analyze audio recorded by cameras before the attack. They found that 25 minutes before the strike the drone circled the group 11 times.
Dylan Collins, 37, an AFP cameraman, was wounded in October 2023 in an Israeli tank strike in Lebanon that killed a Reuters colleague. Collins was in Washington, D.C., this month demanding accountability for what human rights groups say was a targeted attack by the Israeli military.
Frank Langfitt/NPR
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The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called the attack and others like it “war crimes.”
CPJ says at least 246 journalists and media workers in Gaza and the region have been killed since the start of the war. The Israeli government has repeatedly denied deliberately targeting journalists.
The State Department did not respond to NPR's request for comment. Collins says he has reached out to the Biden and Trump administrations in search of answers.
“A staffer for a current Cabinet member in the Trump administration told me that if I had been killed, they might have been able to come forward with a statement,” Collins told NPR, “but since I was only wounded, it would have been quite difficult.”
Collins is reluctant to speak out and says he feels much more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it. Collins, lanky with blond hair and blue eyes, spent much of the NPR interview fidgeting with his hands.
Asked why the US government does not seem to be pursuing the issue, Collins replied: “Because it may not be politically feasible.”
United States Israeli weaponswhich is America's main ally in the Middle East.
Vermont's congressional delegation supported Collins and his desire for answers and justice. In 2024 they wrote to The State Department is asking for an independent investigation under the War Crimes Act.
In response, the State Department said it called on Israel to investigate and would continue to engage with local authorities until there was “appropriate accountability.”
“Too many journalists and other civilians have been killed and wounded since the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7,” the letter said. “We have no higher priority than the safety of U.S. citizens.”
Collins doesn't buy it.
“I don't think I was overly optimistic about getting all sorts of support from the American government,” Collins said, “but I certainly expected more than nothing.”
Assi, 30, underwent 30 operations and spent three months in the intensive care unit. She gets a prosthetic leg, learns to walk again, and plans to return to photojournalism.
Assi says she knows why the Israelis opened fire on her and her colleagues.
“It’s a systematic process, it’s a plan,” she said from her home near Beirut. “The intent is solely to intimidate and kill, essentially, journalists. And they do it with complete impunity because they know that no one will hold them accountable.”
