German reporter arrested in Lebanon after appearing on Israeli news

Paul Ronzheimer and his team were abducted from their hotel room and released only after the German embassy intervened.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A German reporter was arrested and questioned in Lebanon just a day after he appeared on an Israeli news channel describing what he saw of the IDF assassination of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.

Neither the Bild newspaper, nor the Die Welt news channel, who both employ senior war correspondent Paul Ronzheimer, claimed that the arrest was a result of the interview.

They both reported Wednesday that Ronzheimer and his team had been abducted from their hotel rooms on September 28, the day after the IDF airstrike.

The journalists were handcuffed and blindfolded, then taken to an unknown location and interrogated for hours, “probably by Lebanese military intelligence,” the Die Welt report said.

After some 12 hours, they were then released, thanks to the intervention of the German Embassy in Beirut.

Ronzheimer actually continued reporting from the Lebanese capital for several more days before flying home. This accounted for the delay in reporting his abduction, his media colleagues said, as they wanted to make sure he was safe before publicizing what had happened.

The Bild report noted that Hezbollah had posted Ronzheimer’s picture on social media the morning of his arrest, along with an accusation that he had violated unspecified “conditions.”

The terror organization, which controls much of Lebanese life both as part of the government and behind the scenes, rarely lets reporters into the country anymore, Bild reported Ronzheimer as noting.

The journalist was undeterred by his experience, saying that he would “of course continue to report on this war,” even though “it is currently very difficult for many reporters to report on what is happening.”

In his interview on Channel 11 on September 27, Ronzheimer said he had just returned to the center of town from the area of the bombing of Nasrallah’s headquarters, which was hidden deep underground in the Dahiyeh neighborhood of Beirut.

“We felt the whole explosion, six times,” he said, “and it was really, really heavy to feel it here.” He spoke of the then-conflicting reports of whether Nasrallah had been killed in the attack, saying that no journalists were being allowed into the area to investigate the incident or the aftermath for themselves.

Ronzheimer is very well known in his home country, thanks to his news reports and his being a regular guest on all major political talk shows on TV.