France Opens War Crimes Probe Into Airstrike That Killed Ali Cherri's Parents

By Daniel Okafor

France's War Crimes Unit has opened a formal investigation into the Israeli airstrike that killed the parents of French-Lebanese artist and filmmaker Ali Cherri. The probe comes seven months after Cherri filed a complaint accusing Israel of war crimes.

The strike hit Cherri's family home in Barbour, Beirut, on November 26, 2024. It killed his parents, the domestic worker employed in the apartment Cherri owned, and at least four other civilians living in the building. It landed less than 12 hours before the temporary ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel came into effect.

What do the investigators have to work with?

Plenty, on paper. Amnesty International addressed the strike in a February report on Israeli war crimes in Lebanon. The organization stated that Israeli forces had no evidence of a verifiable military target at the site. It also concluded that forces failed to issue an evacuation warning to civilians before bombing the 12-story residential building.

The Cherri family constructed the building themselves. The structural damage was localized to the eastern apartments on the 7th to 10th floors. Cherri's late parents, Mahmoud Naim Cherri and Nadira Hayek, and domestic worker Birki Negesa were found in the wreck of the artist's ninth-floor apartment, where they resided.

Who built the evidentiary record?

Cherri did not rely on NGOs alone. He and his legal representatives at the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH, a Paris-based human rights alliance) commissioned Forensic Architecture, the London-based investigative research agency, to digitally reconstruct the apartment building. The reconstruction drew on the artist's own documentation of the site after the strike and on testimony from neighboring witnesses.

Both Amnesty International's findings and Forensic Architecture's report informed Cherri's complaint, which accuses Israel of war crimes by "intentionally directing an attack against a civilian object."

Why does this matter beyond one family?

Universal jurisdiction cases move slowly and rarely. France's War Crimes Unit (the national prosecutor's office specializing in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes) taking up a complaint from a living artist about a strike on his own childhood building is unusual.

Cherri, a prominent contemporary artist and filmmaker, has effectively turned his family's catastrophe into a documented legal case, pairing human rights research with forensic modelling. That method — witness photographs fed into a digital reconstruction — is now part of the prosecutorial file.

The investigation's next step will test whether French prosecutors can move from a case file to accountability. For an artist who lost his parents fewer than twelve hours before a ceasefire, that question is not abstract.