(AP)- When an Israeli bomb hit a high-rise apartment building in Beirut’s Tayyouneh neighborhood on Friday, hundreds of people were in the street at an intersection several hundred meters away.
An Associated Press photographer was among them. After the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued an evacuation warning along with a map marking the targeted building, Hassan Ammar donned his bulletproof vest and helmet and rushed to the scene, taking up position at a safe distance and wearing a long lens.
The IDF said the building housed facilities for the Lebanese extremist group Hezbollah.
However, Ammar had a different association with the building. He grew up less than a mile from there and had visited there many times.
When he was a child, he recalled, during the 15-year Lebanese civil war that ended in 1990, “this building was on the front line between Muslim and Christian neighborhoods,” the so-called Green Line.
But in later years, Ammar said he visited the building “many times”. There was a notary on the first floor and a sports supply store next door where I shopped. Next to the building was a cemetery where his family’s loved ones were buried.
“I know him very well,” he said.
Ammar said he had even once considered renting an apartment in the building that was hit, or in the adjacent building – he can no longer remember which – because it had a view of the pine trees in Horch Beirut. There is a large public park nearby. ,
When he heard the sound of the projectile overhead, Ammar had already focused his camera on the building with a high shutter speed, and immediately began taking photographs, capturing the bomb in the air and as soon as It fell down, ending with a huge explosion. ,
There were no immediate reports of casualties, but much of the building was reduced to debris.
Richard Weir, crisis, conflict and weapons researcher at Human Rights Watch, reviewed close-up photographs of Friday’s bombing to determine what type of weapon was used.
“The bombs and components visible in the photographs, including the fins, wire harness covers and tail fin sections, are consistent with a 2,000-pound MK-84 series general purpose bomb equipped with a Boeing Joint Directed Attack Munition (JDAM) tail kit. ,” He said.
Weir said that “the use of large air-launched bombs such as these, which cause widespread effects in populated areas, poses significant risks to civilians and civilian objects.”
A few weeks earlier, another AP photographer, Bilal Hussein, had captured almost the same scene when a similar bomb fell on a nearby building in Beirut.
The IDF says it takes steps to reduce civilian casualties by issuing warnings before many of its attacks in Lebanon.
More than 3,200 people have been killed in Lebanon during 13 months of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah – most of them since mid-September – of whom about 27% were women and children, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.