More than 3,500 people have been killed in Lebanon, and more than 900 women and children have been killed, according to the Health Ministry. More than a million people have been displaced since Israeli ground troops invaded while Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets, drones and missiles into Israel – and drew violent Israeli retaliation.

Human Rights Watch determined that Israeli forces carried out the October 25 attack using a dropped bomb equipped with a U.S.-produced Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) guidance kit.

The group said the U.S. government should suspend arms transfers to Israel because of the military’s “repeated illegal attacks on civilians, for which U.S. officials may be complicit in war crimes.”

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military on the report.

The Biden administration said in May that Israel’s use of U.S.-supplied weapons in Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza likely violated international humanitarian law, but that war conditions prevented U.S. officials to determine it with certainty during specific airstrikes.

The journalists killed in the airstrike in the southeastern town of Hasbaya were cameraman Ghassan Najjar and broadcast technician Mohammed Rida of the Beirut-based pan-Arab channel Al-Mayadeen, as well as cameraman Wissam Qassim, who worked for Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television.

Human Rights Watch said a munition hit the one-story building and exploded when it hit the ground.

“Israel’s use of American weapons to illegally attack and kill journalists far from any military targets is a terrible mark on the United States as well as Israel,” said Richard Weir, senior researcher on crises, conflicts and weapons to Human Rights Watch.

Weir added that “the Israeli army’s previous deadly attacks on journalists, without any consequences, leave little hope of accountability for this or future violations against the media.”

Human Rights Watch said it found remains at the site and examined photographs of parts collected by the complex’s owner and determined that they matched a JDAM guidance kit assembled and sold by the American company Boeing.

The JDAM is affixed to air-dropped bombs and allows them to be guided to a target using satellite coordinates, making the weapon accurate to within several meters, the group said.

In November 2023, two journalists from Al-Mayadeen TV were killed in a drone strike on their reporting location. A month earlier, Israeli bombings in southern Lebanon killed Issam Abdallah, a Reuters videographer, and seriously injured other journalists from the French international news agency Agence France-Presse and Qatari television Al-Jazeera, on a hill not far from the Israeli border.