Fouad Hassan, 74, was sitting on the balcony of his home in Juna district, south of Beirut, reading on his mobile phone when the airstrike occurred on Monday night.
The Israeli military did not order an evacuation, but rockets hit the homes of his children and grandchildren, just a short walk away.
“When the bombing happened, I fainted,” Fuad said. “Due to the smoke from the strike, I was taken for oxygen. When I recovered, I found that the entire neighborhood had been destroyed.”
Today, piles of shattered steel frames and masonry lie where many residential buildings once stood. In places where buildings still stand, the belongings of the people inside can be seen through holes in the walls.
Excavators and about 40 local men are working slowly to dig beneath the rubble and search for bodies.
“Look at the destruction. The whole neighborhood was destroyed, people here died,” Fouad says, gesturing at the bomb site. “My granddaughter died here and my grandson is still in a coma. They were both 23 years old.”
Fuad is well known in the community. The actor and comedian appears on Lebanese television and is known by his stage name Zaghlul. As we walked around the bombing site, locals came up to shake Fuad’s hand and offer their condolences.
Fuad pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and showed him a photo of his granddaughter Alaa. She looks confident as she poses for the camera in a smart gold dress.
“She was happily engaged and looking forward to getting married in three months,” Fuad said. “She applied for Miss Lebanon and got chopped up. Why? Why would the world allow this?"
Since Israel began escalating its airstrikes against Hezbollah in September, rockets have hit all parts of Israel. This is a military operation that Israeli leaders feel has so far resulted in a major victory, having claimed the life of Hezbollah’s senior leadership.
However, it was also a campaign that claimed many innocent lives, with numerous reports of entire families being killed in strikes across the country.
More than 1,900 Lebanese have been killed since Israel stepped up its airstrikes, according to government figures. Statistics do not distinguish between Hezbollah fighters and civilians.
Despite not ordering residents to evacuate in advance on Monday night, the Israeli military later said it was targeting “Hezbollah terrorist targets” but gave no further details.
Initial reports from the scene suggested that the premises of Rafik Hariri Hospital, the capital’s largest public hospital, had been attacked, but the Israeli military denied this.
The damage to the hospital is superficial, but beyond the road, littered with parked cars with windows blown out, lies an impoverished and impoverished area.
Fuad’s son, Ahmed, joined them. He showed me a photo of his son lying in a hospital’s intensive care unit, his face bandaged and covered in blood.
“This was my home. Like everything else, it’s gone now. We have no place to go, nothing to wear. This is a massacre. There are no bases here, no Hezbollah, nothing here. None,” Ahmed said.
It is not clear why the Israeli military issues evacuation orders before some missile attacks but not others, but if Israel were to attack densely populated residential areas without warning, the human casualties would be It can be indiscriminate and expensive.
Fuad talks about playing with young children in his neighborhood who died in the strike.
“Every time I walked into the neighborhood, they yelled, ‘Grandpa, grandpa!’ What did you bring us?’ I gave them candy, chips, popcorn. Their loss fills me with sadness. They are all dead. Their mother is still buried under the rubble, along with one of her children.”
As we began to leave the scene, silence fell over the assembled crowd and we saw the stretcher carrying the wrapped body being carried away by an excavator.
The mother was reportedly found next to the child.
