BBCRihab Faour fled her house. Then she fled once more. Then a 3rd time. Then a fourth. And by the fourth time, a 12 months after the primary, she had been fleeing Israeli bombs for thus lengthy that nowhere in Lebanon felt protected.
Her journey had begun in October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel. That prompted Hezbollah, the Lebanese political and militant group, to fireside rockets into Israel and Israel to retaliate by bombing southern Lebanon.
The Israeli bombs fell shut sufficient to Rihab’s village that the 33-year-old and her husband Saeed, an worker of the municipal water firm, gathered their daughters Tia, eight, and Naya, six, and fled to Rihab’s dad and mom’ home in Dahieh, a suburb of the capital Beirut.
In Dahieh, for some time, life went on virtually as regular, with the exception that Naya and Tia missed their pals, their very own beds, their toys and all garments they’d needed to go away behind.
Most of all they missed going to high school, which had been changed by on-line studying. They have been excited when, again in August, Rihab enrolled them in a brand new college in Beirut and took them to purchase model new college uniforms.
However earlier than their first day may arrive, Israel expanded its bombing of Lebanon to incorporate components of Beirut, significantly the Dahieh suburb that the household now known as house.
Israel was assassinating senior Hezbollah figures within the suburb, but it surely was utilizing giant, bunker-busting bombs, every able to destroying a residential constructing. In some strikes, Israel dropped dozens of those bombs in a single go and flattened total metropolis blocks.
So the Faour household packed up and fled once more, this time to a rented home in one other Beirut neighbourhood, Jnah. After a strong air strike in Jnah, they moved to Saeed’s dad and mom’ home within the neighbourhood of Barbour. There, they lived with 17 others in a single home – folks piled on folks.
For Tia and Naya although, now 9 and 7, it was a uncommon pleasure to be surrounded by their cousins day and night time. A lot in order that even when Rihab’s father, a retired Lebanese military sergeant, discovered a rental condominium within the Basta neighbourhood only for the 4 of them, the women didn’t wish to go.
“Naya begged us to remain there with all of the household,” Rihab recalled. “We informed her we simply needed to go for one sleep on this new home, then we might come straight again to the household and to all the youngsters.”
And he or she provided the women a cut price – come to remain on the new condominium and you’ll select your dinner. So on the best way house they stopped for rotisserie rooster and different treats from the store, and at about 7.30pm, with the streets nonetheless alive with folks, the household pulled as much as a rundown constructing in Basta in central Beirut.
Again in 2006, in the course of the earlier battle between Israel and Hezbollah, the bombing was confined to sure areas of Lebanon – the south, Dahieh, and a few infrastructure targets. This time, as senior members of Hezbollah unfold out across the nation, Israel bombed them the place they went.
This introduced bombs to locations beforehand thought protected, together with components of central Beirut.
None of that was weighing on Tia and Naya because the household unloaded their belongings into the brand new condominium. For now, the women have been extra involved with returning to their cousins on the earliest alternative.
Not like Saeed’s dad and mom’ home, the brand new Basta condominium had operating water and a generator for electrical energy. The ladies have been pleased after they noticed that the household lastly had their very own house. Rihab and Saeed relaxed just a little. Most certainly, there would have been an Israeli drone buzzing overhead, however the sound had grow to be so widespread over Beirut that it was potential to tune it out.
Rihab put the meals and treats on the desk. “We sat right down to eat and we have been speaking and laughing,” she stated. “And that was it, my final reminiscence of them.”
The bomb was a US-made Jdam. It hit the constructing on 10 October at about 8pm, half an hour after the household had arrived. It levelled all three storeys and destroyed components of adjoining buildings and automobiles, and killed 22 men, women and children, making it the deadliest strike on central Beirut because the starting of the preventing a 12 months earlier.
The Israeli army issued no warning forward of the strike, so the constructing was full of individuals. Israel was reportedly focusing on Wafiq Safa, the top of Hezbollah’s co-ordination and liaison unit, however Safa was by no means reported to be among the many lifeless. He had both survived, or he wasn’t there to start with. The IDF declined to touch upon the strike or the dearth of a warning forward of it.
Rihab awoke in Beirut’s Zahraa Hospital, unable to maneuver. Her again and arm have been badly injured and he or she wanted at the least two operations. She drifted out and in of consciousness. Every thing in her thoughts between laughing along with her daughters at dinner and waking up within the hospital was clean.
Whereas she lay there that night time, her household searched Beirut’s hospitals. By midnight, they knew that Saeed and Tia have been lifeless. DNA exams could be required to verify that Naya had been killed, in addition to one other woman her age dropped at the identical hospital, as a result of their accidents prevented simple identification.
Rihab’s medical doctors suggested the household to not inform her any of this. They have been anxious that, nonetheless going through important surgical procedure, the information could be an excessive amount of for her. So for 2 weeks, as she underwent after which recovered from her operations, her mom Basima reassured her that Saeed and the women have been being handled in numerous hospitals.
However Rihab sensed that one thing was unsuitable, and he or she started to insist on seeing photos and movies of the women. “She may really feel it in her coronary heart,” Basima stated.
Eleven days after the strike, the DNA take a look at confirmed that Tia was lifeless, and on the fifteenth day a hospital psychiatrist informed Rihab that Saeed and the women have been gone.
Six weeks later, Rihab was sitting in a stiff plastic chair in an condominium in Beirut, her eyes darkish and her face drawn. She was nonetheless recovering from her surgical procedures – to put in eight screws into her backbone and one other three into her arm. She had been mendacity down for a very long time, and now she was making an attempt to take a seat up extra and to stroll just a little, although each motion triggered her ache.
Naya’s eighth birthday had been 4 days earlier. Rihab was passing her time “both crying or sleeping”, she stated. However she wished to speak about her household.
“Naya was very connected to me, she adopted me wherever I went. Tia liked her grandparents and he or she was pleased if I left her with them. Each of the women liked drawing, they liked enjoying with toys, they missed going to high school. They’d play instructor and scholar collectively for hours.”
Above all they liked to look at movies collectively on TikTok. Rihab and Saeed thought they have been nonetheless too younger to put up their very own movies on-line, so Rihab would movie them dancing and enjoying and inform the women she was posting them on the app, which appeared to fulfill them, for now.
Saeed had come into Rihab’s life in 2013. Rihab was raised in Beirut however her household would go to the village of Mays El Jabal in the summertime, as a result of the air was cooler there and the village was surrounded by countryside, and that summer time she met Saeed by mutual pals.
Rihab accomplished her undergraduate legislation diploma and commenced learning for a masters, however the couple grew to become engaged after which married, and shortly Tia was born, so Rihab put her budding legislation profession on maintain.
Now, within the midst of her loss, she has tentatively begun to think about learning once more. “I’m going to wish one thing to fill my days,” she stated.
Saeed and Tia have been buried the day after they died, by Rihab’s father and uncles, in short-term wood caskets in an unmarked grave in Dahieh. Two weeks later, the lads of the household dug once more in the identical spot and buried Naya. Rihab’s uncle positioned two sprigs of synthetic cherry blossom atop the grave, for the 2 women, and later another person laid a wreath for a stranger buried beside them.
Then an Israeli air strike hit the constructing instantly adjoining to the cemetery and the resultant blast wave and particles smashed gravestones and churned up the earth round them. About the identical time, one other Israeli air strike hit the household house in Dahieh, destroying a number of gadgets Rihab had wished to maintain, together with two new, unworn college uniforms.
Not lengthy after that, it was throughout. A ceasefire introduced final week allowed hundreds of displaced folks to stream again to their villages within the south of Lebanon. Rihab and Saeed’s village was closely bombed by the Israelis and their household house there destroyed, her uncle stated, however Rihab can’t return house anyway, as a result of she can be in a backbrace for a number of extra months and can’t journey.
As pleasure unfold by Lebanon on the information of the ceasefire, new photos emerged of Wafiq Safa, the reported goal of the bomb that killed Saeed, Tea, Naya and 19 others. Safa had not been seen in public because the strike, however he seemed to be alive and nicely.
Extra reporting by Joanna Mazjoub. Images by Joel Gunter.
