Peter Welch, Becca Balint call for greater scrutiny into Israeli military’s attack on Vermont journalist

Vermont’s Democratic U.S. Sen. Peter Welch and Rep. Becca Balint say that both the Israeli and U.S. governments have stonewalled their inquiries into a deadly attack on a group of journalists by Israel’s military in 2023, which injured a reporter from Vermont.

Dylan Collins, a video journalist for Agence France-Presse, was reporting in Lebanon near the Israeli border on Oct. 13, 2023. He and six other journalists were suddenly struck by two shells, fired 37 seconds apart, from an Israeli tank, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, an international press freedom organization. 

The attack left Collins, who is from Weston, with shrapnel injuries. It severely wounded his Lebanese colleague at AFP, Christina Assi, to the point her right leg had to be amputated. Issam Abdallah, a Lebanese journalist working at Reuters, was killed. 

The strikes marked the first time Israel’s military targeted journalists in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks on that country by Hamas, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. In the two-plus years since then, the organization has found, Israeli forces have killed at least 246 total journalists and other media workers in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and Yemen.

Over that same time, Israel’s ground and air campaign against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip has killed more than 67,000 people, according to local health authorities. Israeli strikes have destroyed vast swaths of buildings and other infrastructure in the enclave. The United Nations has declared a famine there, saying more than half a million people face “starvation, destitution and death” as a result of Israel’s war. 

An independent U.N. commission determined earlier this year that Israel has committed four “genocidal acts” in Gaza since October 2023. The Hamas attacks on Oct. 7 that prompted the campaign killed about 1,200 people and led to 250 taken hostage.

Welch held a press conference Thursday outside the U.S. Capitol, along with Balint and Collins, to call for greater scrutiny of the strikes on Oct. 13, 2023. Welch and Balint said their offices, along with that of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have tried to get details on why Israel struck the journalists and how the attack was authorized, to little avail.

Sanders was not at the press conference Thursday but met with Collins that day, according to his social media feeds. Vermont’s congressional delegation have been some of the first members of Congress to publicly call Israel’s war a “genocide.”

The Vermont lawmakers on Thursday sent what they said was an eighth letter to the U.S. State Department since May 2024 asking what it knew about the attack. When posing questions to both former President Joe Biden’s and President Donald Trump’s administrations, “we’ve been stonewalled at every single turn,” Welch told reporters Thursday. 

Collins stood behind him, nodding as the senator spoke.

“I thought that when an American citizen is wounded and attacked — carried out by the U.S.’s greatest ally in the Middle East — that we would be able to get some answers,” Collins said. “But for two years, I’ve been met by deafening silence.”

In June, the Israeli government told Welch’s office it had reviewed the attack and found that no soldiers violated their instructions or the country’s military’s rules of engagement, according to a press release from Welch’s office. But Welch said Thursday he did not believe the investigation was legitimate because Israeli officials have not interviewed Collins or, seemingly, requested any forensic evidence collected by reporters on the scene or the independent human rights investigators who reviewed the incident afterward.  

“It’s clear that the IDF never had serious intentions to investigate this attack,” the senator said, using the acronym for the Israeli military.

Both Welch and Balint said they believed Israel’s strikes on the journalists violated human rights laws because Collins and his colleagues were wearing marked press equipment, and a van parked near them was labeled with “press,” too. A deliberate attack on civilians is a war crime under international law.

Investigations by AFP, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Reuters and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon have concluded Israel’s strike on Oct. 13, 2023, was “an apparently deliberate attack on a group of clearly identifiable members of the media,” according to Welch’s office.

Elizabeth Rghebi, an advocacy director for Amnesty International USA, said Thursday that outside investigators had determined Israeli military aircraft were circling over the group of reporters for about 40 minutes before the tank strikes, which she said shows the military must have seen the group’s “press” markings. Collins also recalled a drone flying overhead.

Balint said at Thursday’s press conference she had little doubt the attack was a war crime.

“Let’s call it what it is,” she said.