A forgotten massacre in a Lebanese village. international

On 29 September, Hezbollah confirmed the death of its leader Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli bombing. Over the next two days, and to the shock of half Lebanon, Israeli forces attacked a building in the center of Beirut for the first time in two decades, bombed Yemen and invaded southern Lebanon. The extraordinary nature of the events destroyed the news, relegating another bombing on the same day, the 29th, in Ain el Delb, an unnamed village near the city of Sidon, to lower news headlines. 71 people died, they were buried with bricks instead of graves.

The six-story building with more than 70 apartments, which housed a hundred people, including residents and displaced people from parts most affected by the bombing, collapsed about two minutes after the missile strike, according to witnesses and health workers, according to video recorded from a mobile phone. Can be seen in. It is another forgotten massacre, like the one in Gaza, that Lebanon is now beginning to experience, after more than 1,300 deaths in recent weeks. The Israeli military – which can take seconds to announce “selective killings” of leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad – did not comment on the attack at the time, nor would it now say what the motive was.

Ashraf Ramzan survived and first returned under the debris, under which he spent three hours until rescue teams rescued him. He is not at all comfortable, but he wants to find the memories of his mother and sister Julia, who did not meet the same fate. On top of that, his sister’s wallet, containing $500 she had raised to help the displaced people of southern Lebanon and Dahiye, now the ghostly Shia suburb of Beirut, numbered in the thousands then and stands at 1.2 million today. “I promised to find them and donate them for the same thing,” he says.

Julia seems to be one of those people who doesn’t just get compliments on the day of her funeral. His last message on Facebook, hours before he died, was: “Hello, good people. There is a family of 18 people in Sidon who needs help. They don’t have anything. Is it possible that we can achieve something?” He also combined volunteering with studying psychology at the University of Beirut. two hours before class OnlineFirst missile hit.

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All four of them (parents and child) were in the living room. Julia was the first to notice that the building was leaning, so she grabbed her mother and ran down the stairs. Ashraf, naked in the heat, went to the closet to get a T-shirt. When he reached the threshold of the door, he felt what he describes as if someone “grabbed his legs very tightly and pulled him down.” This was the force of gravity.

The next thing he remembers is that he was lying in the wreckage, with one leg bent in every direction (he’s OK, but he’s still limping) and he heard his father saying: “Mom. , I don’t know where he is! Julia is with me! The sound was heard far away. There must have been a lot of things on them, because you could barely hear them. And I didn’t listen to Julia.” Ashraf’s cell phone was in his pants pocket and he discovered it was still working, so he spent three hours “praying a lot” and sending the location to anyone who could help them. Five hours later his father was pulled out alive. To his sister and mother, who died of suffocation.

He is equally disappointed and angry when he returns to that place for the first time. “Is this a threat to Israel’s security?” he says while holding the clothes with which his mother recorded the video suitabilityA teddy bear, a washing machine, a wristwatch, a Quran, a school notebook, an iPad… the wreckage is still full of everyday objects.

Ashraf finds and keeps the pillow that his brother, who lives in Kuwait, used when he returned to visit family. She also becomes angry with her mother, perhaps because it is the only thing she has left: “It’s another rug of hers. Why would there be so many? I can’t understand it…” Suddenly, on the other side of the mountain of iron and cement, a neighbor who has lost her child cries out with tearful eyes: “Come get your mother’s pictures.” She Gives a red box full of old family photos.

Mother and son were buried today in Sidon’s Sunni cemetery with a brick and a sticky headstone. “It surprised us and there were so many people that there was no time to lay stones on the graves,” says Ahmed Shahade, 53, who is responsible for preparing cemeteries and bodies. He proposed burying the twenty Sunni dead together rather than scattering them based on family origin “to mark that it was a single massacre”, and he took the opportunity to leave the other twenty empty graves, he explains. . Because “Well, we’re still at war… and you know how Israel is.”

Nor does 79-year-old Mahmoud Skafi understand why Israel is suddenly mocking his son Ali. Since the human essence involves looking for explanations for unexpected tragedies, family members, friends, and neighbors begin to speculate. They have come to express their condolences at his home in Yims Naya, a town where his son lived. There is more pain and understanding than hatred towards Israel.

Some speculate that “someone from Hezbollah” or the Palestinian militia was hiding in the building, as if finding the cause would give some meaning to the dozens of dead, such as his son. “If he had suspected there was a (potential Israeli target), he would have left. And if there were weapons in the basement, there would have been an explosion,” Mahmood says with a photo of his son who is still smiling about his university future now snatched away. Others think that a spy gave false information and Israel fired on the wrong building. A relative listens stunned and asks the others: “Are you really surprised that Israel fired directly at civilians? Did you go a year without seeing what was happening in Gaza?

Ein el Delb had not been bombed in a year of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. It is in an area with a Sunni and Christian majority, far from Israel’s hottest strip, the Bekaa Valley and the Dahiya. The Sunni family also defends the exact opposite of Hezbollah: “one army for one country”, in the words of Ali’s sister Samah, who constantly mourns the death. That is, the party-militia stops controlling In fact Their fiefdoms, in which the armed forces play little role. “I blame everyone for what happened. For everyone,” he adds.

Identification Division

However, they all share a belief that is heard a lot in Lebanon these days: Israeli bombings outside Hezbollah strongholds are trying to stoke identity divisions between Sunnis, Shiites, Christians and Druze, in a country that Already have 15 years experience. war. citizen. This is also the line of the “message to the Lebanese people” issued this Tuesday (in English) by the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. It was a call to stand up against Hezbollah – with the risk of a second civil war – by a representative of a country that had aligned itself with the Christian Phalanges when it besieged Beirut and occupied the south of the country ( 1982-2000).

Last Friday, this newspaper sent the coordinates of the bombed building to the Israeli army spokesman along with two questions and reminded him on two occasions: what was the objective and whether there was prior notice of the evacuation. No response received.

Mustafa Qalqas was one of the first to arrive at the scene, as he was part of the civil protection in crisis committee established by the other large Lebanese Shia faction, Amal, a year earlier. “The image was indescribable, like entering hell. We arrived amidst a cloud of dust and those who survived threw us running and screaming. They ran more on foot than by car. We took the children out in pieces. “You don’t want to see this, I assure you.”

Kalkas believes the same thing as appears from the images: Israel fired two missiles – without warning the neighbors to leave – without much explosive charge, but causing the building to collapse with almost everyone inside. “The sound was not very loud. We realized more what had happened because of the smoke. As you can see, there is no damage to nearby buildings. It’s not like the other bombings I’m used to,” he recalls.

A car comes speeding with a can. The Caterpillar excavator has been searching for survivors for 24 hours and has run out of fuel. Then 52 people died and 60 were saved, some in critical condition. In addition, he estimated, dozens of people were missing. No one knows how to determine them with certainty, as displaced people from the south of the country do not always inform the authorities of their new destination and many families have welcomed them into their homes.

The upper part, closest to the workers, was a series of decomposed faces. Barely 24 hours had passed and a young man with a lost face was holding out hope that his parents would emerge alive from the debris. Kamal Hosho, 61, insisted that “there are two floors left to investigate”, so it was “not absolutely certain” that his niece, his niece’s husband and their three children were dead. In fact, what was troubling him was that people were already praying for him on social networks. Fuad al Baba, phone in hand, remained glued to the fact that his sister (who was also in the building at the time of the Israeli attack) was still receiving her WhatsApp, even though she was not responding.

Suddenly screams are heard. Relatives watch expectantly as paramedics prepare a stretcher and blankets. They will not be needed. Corpse number 53 is encased in a white bag and silence reigns. “So far we have got more normal people from the area. Family. If someone was a Hezbollah member, it would be a normal thing,” Qalqas says. “It’s not as if Nasrallah was there to carry out this massacre.”