Zahra — a Lebanese citizen from the south of Lebanon — was on her balcony, pouring coffee, telling two journalists — one British, one Lebanese — what it is like to live in a town which has now become inside Israel’s yellow line of occupation, and why she can’t leave. Then BANG!!
An Israeli drone had dropped a stun grenade — a flash-bang, the kind police lob to scatter riot crowds — around 30 metres from where they sat. On the recording, you can hear it detonate. You can hear her voice change:
The translation of the Arabic from the audio clip:
Zahra: Your veins are blocked and you have a weakness because of lack of nutrition and lack of…
Mohamad Kleit: Lack of nutrition because…
BANG!
Zahra: the drone struck us, the drone struck us. This is how we’re living!! This is the Lebanese government’s’ ceasefire!
We sent two of our journalists to the south of Lebanon last Monday, 6 July. Guy Smallman, a veteran British photojournalist who has spent decades covering war and protest, and Mohamad Kleit, an accredited Lebanese reporter. Both write for the Canary. Their assignment was the most ordinary thing a journalist can do: sit with people, and listen.
This is how Israel received them.
The Lebanon town Israel ordered to evacuate
They went to Al-Mansouri, a town in the Tyre district. If the name rings a bell, it is because I wrote about it only days ago. Al-Mansouri is one of the towns Israel ordered to evacuate on the very day it signed its “framework” deal in Washington — now stranded behind the new Israeli “yellow line” carved deep inside Lebanese soil.
Guy and Mohamad went to interview the people who refused to leave. They wore body armour marked with PRESS. Mohamad’s car had PRESS on the roof. The Lebanese army stopped them at the edge of town to check Guy’s accreditation, as it does. There were no fighters. There were no other journalists. There was a drone overhead — as there is every day now — and there were families getting on with their lives.
Here is Mohamad’s account, in full:
On the 6th of July 2026, Guy Smallman and I headed to Mansory town in Tyre district to document the situation there with the residing people after the town has become a “border town” due to the newly-imposed Israeli yellow line inside Lebanese territories. As we’ve reached the town around 11AM, there was no sounds of Israeli drones, even though the IOF was present in the neighboring town of Majdalzoun.
We were stopped by the Lebanese military at first as a standard procedure to check on Guy’s accreditation. We were halted for around 15min, while wearing our PPEs with evident PRESS written in them, as well as on the top of my car. 15min later, we heard the drone flying above Mansory, which is a usual thing in the past 3 years, and we kept working as usual. 40min later, we met a local resident that invited us to interview her on her big balcony. As Guy was recording the interview on his phone, an Israeli drone threw a sound grenade around 30m from the balcony. The woman said “they’re trying to terrorise the people here to leave, it’s a daily thing now”.
Another 30min later, under the sound of the Israeli drone, a young man who’s related to the woman joined us for coffee and chatted with Guy, he offered to show him his hometown – Buyout al Siyad – that’s occupied by the Israelis, which is located a few kilometers away from Mansory. Guy and the young man went to a nearby open field to see the occupied town, and that’s where the Israelis dropped another sound grenade near us, around 25m away this time. I told Guy that apparently they’re trying to intimidate and terrorize us to leave, as they’re weary of the presence of journalists documenting the daily lives in these towns. We didn’t leave immediately, we stayed for almost an hour and a half and met even more residents, until we left at around 2:30PM.
Read that line from the woman again, it was around 20 seconds after the bang: “they’re trying to terrorise the people here to leave, it’s a daily thing now.” That is the whole policy, in eleven words.
“They can cause serious injury”
Guy has met these devices before — from the wrong end. Here is his account:
There were two stun grenades dropped near us as we were speaking to locals in Mansoura. These ‘non lethal’ flash-bang devices (which are typically used to scatter hostile crowds during riots) are being used [regularly] by the IOF to harass and intimidate families returning to their homes. Ironically I got seriously injured by one these in 2003 when covering a protest against the G8 in Geneva. They can cause serious injury if detonated near the body.
“Non lethal” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. Guy was seriously injured by one of these in Geneva in 2003. They are not fireworks — detonated close to the body, a flash-bang can burn, deafen, and maim. Israel knows exactly what it’s doing. That is the point of throwing them.
This is not an accident
Let us be clear about what happened here. Two journalists, plainly marked, interviewing civilians, with no combatants anywhere near them — were targeted twice by a military that has made a habit of it.
And it is a habit. Israel has killed more journalists than any government on record, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) — responsible for two-thirds of all press killings in both 2024 and 2025. In Lebanon alone, at least seven journalists have been killed in recent weeks. Among the dead: Ali Shuaib and Fatima Ftouni, killed in the south in March. Amal Khalil, killed in a “double-tap” strike in April — while covering the very thing Guy and Mohamad had gone to cover: Israel demolishing homes in the occupied villages of the south.
Lest we forget my friend, comrade, and frequent collaborator Issam Abdullah — a Reuters photojournalist — who was killed by an israeli tank with a shell straight to his PRESS marked body back on 13 October 2023.
The CPJ have called this a systematic effort to silence journalists — “killing them, targeting them, imprisoning them, intimidating them.” The stun grenade is the intimidation. The missile is the following-through. They are two sides of the same coin: no witnesses to the ethnic cleansing of the south.
Amal Khalil knew exactly why she was a target. Her job, she said before Israel killed her, was to puncture “the enemy’s narrative of targeting only military sites” — to show the bombed homes, the flattened farms, the extermination of people trying to carry on with their lives. That is what Guy and Mohamad were doing on that balcony. That is what the grenades were for.
Lebanon to London
Here is the part that matters most to us. Guy and Mohamad did not leave.
They finished their coffee. They met more residents. They stayed almost another hour and a half, and drove out at half past two in the afternoon — on their own terms, not Israel’s.
The families of Al-Mansouri do not get that choice. For them, the drone and the flash-bang are, in the woman’s words, “a daily thing now.” They cannot write the story and go home. They are home! And a coloniser is trying to make their lives unbearable enough to drive them out of it.
The Canary’s debanking from Lloyds in London and the stun grenades from Israel in south Lebanon. They both have the same intention. To silence truth. To silence solidarity. To cut connections between people. So that the powerful will remain powerful. And those without platforms or anyone to listen will continue having their flesh devoured by vultures.
We cannot allow this to be our reality.
So we will keep trying to give a voice to our siblings in the south of Lebanon. Because the alternative — the thing Israel is spending stun grenades and missiles to achieve — is an occupation and ethnic cleansing carried out in silence, with no one left to write it down.
To Guy and Mohamad: thank you. Stay safe. Keep going. We are all with you.
Love. Solidarity. And power 
.
Featured images via Guy Smallman and Mohamad Kleit
By Jamal Awar
