France Opens War Crimes Investigation into Israeli Bombing of Beirut that Killed Artist Ali Cherri’s Parents

In an apparent legal first, the French War Crimes Unit has opened an investigation into the 2024 Israeli bombing of a Beirut residential building where the family of French Lebanese filmmaker and artist Ali Cherri lived. The announcement comes six months after Cherri and the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) filed a complaint alleging that the Israeli military intentionally targeted a civilian structure, killing seven people, including the artist’s parents, which amounted to a war crime.

The complaint centers on the Israeli military’s bombing of a residential building in Beirut’s Noueiri neighborhood, just hours before a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah was set to take effect. The strike destroyed the ninth-floor apartment home to the artist’s parents, Mahmoud Naim Cherri and Nadira Hayek, as well as Birki Negesa, a domestic worker employed by the couple. The building’s seventh and eighth floors were also destroyed.

“To our knowledge, this is the very first judicial investigation opened into the crimes committed by the Israeli army in Lebanon since October 2023,” said Clémence Bectarte, lawyer and coordinator of the FIDH Litigation Action Group. “We hope that this investigation will shed full light on the bombing of 26 November 2024, which we qualified as a war crime in our complaint.”

Cherri, who lives and works between Paris and Beirut, is one of Lebanon’s most prominent contemporary artists. He received the Silver Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where he showed his sculpture triad Titans and video installation Of Men and Gods and Mud (both 2022) in the main exhibition, “The Milk of Dreams,” curated by Cecilia Alemani. His recent exhibition at Almine Rech in New York, “Last Watch Before Dawn,” continued a longstanding preoccupation of his practice: the archaeology of conflict and its excavation in the mind and political memory.

As Cherri holds dual French and Lebanese nationality, the judicial investigation will focus only on the bombing of the apartment. According to the FIDH, the French courts do not have jurisdiction over the events that led to the deaths of the victims, who were not French nationals.

“The opening of this judicial investigation marks another important step in our fight against impunity and our struggle for justice for those who were killed. For my family and me, it is essential that this investigation establish responsibility, and ensure that those who ordered and carried out this bombing are held accountable for their actions,” Cherri said in a statement.

Israel launched a military campaign in Lebanon in September 2024, saying it aimed to target the Iran-allied militant group Hezbollah. The campaign involved aerial bombardments across the Beirut region and a ground invasion of southern Lebanon, displacing roughly 1 million people. In April, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) reported that Israeli forces had committed nearly 10,000 violations of the ceasefire agreement in less than a year, including more than 500 airstrikes in Lebanon, carried out on an “almost daily” basis. The UN also warned of a “mounting toll of civilian deaths and injuries.”

Israel has consistently rejected accusations that it has violated the ceasefire, characterizing its actions in southern Lebanon as responses to what it describes as violations by Hezbollah.