Two French investigating magistrates have formally initiated a judicial inquiry into a suspected war crime tied to an Israeli aerial bombardment of a Beirut residential high-rise in November 2024 that claimed the lives of seven unarmed civilians, including the mother and father of dual Franco-Lebanese contemporary artist Ali Cherri. The formal probe was triggered by a legal complaint filed back in April by Cherri alongside the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), a leading global human rights advocacy network. Legal representatives for Cherri and FIDH confirmed to Agence France-Presse that this marks the very first time French judicial authorities have opened a formal investigation into alleged offenses committed by the Israeli military in Lebanon since the Israel-Hezbollah conflict erupted with Israeli military operations in October 2023. In an interview with AFP, Cherri shared that he had spent nearly two years advocating for accountability for the strike that killed his parents and five other local residents, emphasizing that the newly launched inquiry represented a landmark milestone for his grieving family even as he acknowledged the long, arduous path to full justice that still lies ahead. Cherri further stressed that the attack on his family was not a one-off isolated incident, framing his legal fight as a broader campaign to uphold the dignity of all civilian casualties caught in cross-border hostilities, and expressing hope that the investigation would dismantle the long-standing culture of impunity that has shielded Israeli officials accused of targeting civilian populations across Lebanon and Palestine. The deadly air strike took place on November 27, 2024, just 10 and a half hours before a mutually agreed ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah was set to go into full effect. The targeted 12-story apartment complex in Beirut’s densely populated Noueiri district suffered catastrophic damage, with three entire floors of the building completely destroyed in the blast. The French judicial inquiry draws on rigorous independent on-the-ground research conducted by Amnesty International and the specialized forensic investigation collective Forensic Architecture. In a public report released in April 2025, Amnesty International investigators documented no evidence of any active military target operating in the immediate vicinity of the residential building at the time of the 5:30 p.m. strike. The human rights group also recovered physical debris from the attack site confirming the munition used was a U.S.-manufactured GBU-39 precision-guided bomb, concluding there was a well-documented reasonable basis to suspect the incident constituted a clear violation of international humanitarian law, and formally calling for the strike to be probed as a potential war crime. A source close to the case speaking to AFP confirmed that France’s specialized National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT), which holds national jurisdiction over all alleged war crime cases, formally requested the opening of full judicial investigations into the incident back in September 2025, after prosecutors reviewed evidence and confirmed the existence of serious, consistent corroborating indicators that the alleged offenses had been committed. The formal investigation is grounded in French domestic legal provisions that classify the deliberate targeting of civilian non-military property as a prosecutable war crime. Cherri’s lead legal counsel Clemence Bectarte explained that the core mandate of the ongoing inquiry is to fully reconstruct the sequence of events that led to the bombing, identify all parties responsible for ordering and carrying out the strike, and establish formal accountability. Due to limits on French court jurisdiction, the scope of the case is restricted specifically to the destruction of Cherri’s own apartment in the targeted building, as French legal authorities do not hold jurisdiction over the deaths of the five non-French civilians killed in the blast, meaning Cherri cannot file formal homicide charges in French courts over his parents’ deaths. This new Beirut probe is part of a broader slate of ongoing war crime proceedings overseen by PNAT: the prosecutor’s office has already launched separate preliminary investigations into alleged acts of torture and war crimes tied to Israeli military interceptions of humanitarian aid flotillas bound for Gaza in 2025 and 2026, and at the end of 2025, PNAT requested Paris-based investigating judges open a separate formal war crimes inquiry into the 2023 Israeli bombing in Gaza that killed two French minor children. Multiple sources close to the Gaza case confirmed that prosecutors have formally ruled out pursuing charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in that separate ongoing investigation.