At 4:40 p.m. on 8 June, Imad Yassine sent his family a voice message.
He had arrived safely at the family farm in Adchit, southern Lebanon. It was a routine update, the kind of message he had sent countless times before.
His family did not know it would be the last time they heard his voice.
Just over two hours later, Imad was repairing an electricity generator with his neighbour, Zahi Tarhini, when an Israeli drone struck them.
At 6:57 p.m., Imad was killed.
He was 68 years old.
He was a father, a grandfather and a businessman who had spent decades caring for the family poultry company, Yassine Chicken. The business had been passed down through generations, and the farm was part of the life he had worked years to build.
Imad was not carrying a weapon.
He was not fighting.
He was repairing a generator on his family’s land when Israel killed him.
For his daughter, Lebanese journalist Zeinab Yassine, his story could not end as another name in a casualty report.
After years of reporting other people’s stories, she was suddenly forced to report her own: the final voice message from her father, the exact time he was killed and the ordinary work he had been doing moments before the strike.
She decided that silence was not an option.
Zeinab has begun legal proceedings against Israel over her father’s killing. Through the case, she is seeking accountability for what she says was the unlawful killing of a civilian.
“I know no lawsuit can bring my father back,” she says. “But staying silent would mean accepting that what happened to him can happen again.”
The case is about Imad, but for Zeinab, it cannot end with him.
It is also about every Lebanese family that has buried someone after an Israeli strike. Every civilian killed without an investigation. Every parent, child, husband, wife or sibling whose life was reduced to a number before the world moved on.
Zeinab is known as the first hijab-wearing journalist to appear on Lebanon’s state television. She reported throughout Israel’s war on Lebanon and spent years documenting the experiences of others.
Now she is using that same voice to pursue justice for her own father.
No legal decision can undo what happened in Adchit. A court cannot return Imad to his children and grandchildren. It cannot give his family another voice message or allow him to walk back onto the farm he spent years building.
But legal action can challenge the assumption that Israel may kill Lebanese civilians without consequence.
Zeinab hopes other families will come forward and pursue their own cases. She does not want those who lost loved ones to believe they must carry the evidence, grief and fight for accountability alone.
“If you’ve lost someone,” she says, “you don’t have to face this alone.”
For Zeinab, refusing silence is now part of mourning her father.
Imad Yassine’s life ended on 8 June.
His family’s fight for justice has only begun.