Fouad Hassan, 74, was sitting on his balcony in the Jnah neighborhood of southern Beirut looking at his phone when the airstrike hit on Monday night.
Israeli troops have not issued an evacuation order A few steps away before the rocket crashed into the homes of his descendants.
“When the explosion happened, I fainted,” Fouad said. “I was taken on oxygen because of the smoke from the strike. As I got better, I realized that the entire community had been devastated.
Now, a crumbling heap of steel and masonry lies where many of the residential towers sit closely together. Where buildings still stand, people and their belongings can be seen through holes blown in the walls.
An excavator and about 40 local men were slowly digging under the rubble and searching for bodies.
“Look at the damage – the whole neighborhood is destroyed, people here are dead,” Fouad said, pointing to the site of the blast. “My granddaughter died here and my grandson is still in a coma. Both were 23 years old at the time.
Fouad is a well-known figure in the community. As an actor and comedian, he has appeared on Lebanese television and is known by his stage name Zaghloul. As we walked around the site of the blast, locals came to shake Fouad’s hand and express their condolences.
Fouad took his phone out of his pocket and showed us a photo of his granddaughter Alaa. Wearing a beautiful gold dress, she looked confident as she posed for the camera.
“She is very happy to be engaged and looking forward to getting married in three months,” Fouad said. “She applied to be Miss Lebanon and was torn to pieces. Why? Why would the world allow this to happen?
since israel Air strikes against Hezbollah escalated in Septemberrockets struck across the country. Israeli leaders consider the military campaign a huge victory so far – claiming the lives of senior Hezbollah leaders.
However, it was also a movement that claimed many innocent lives, with numerous reports of entire families being murdered in strikes across the country.
More than 1,900 Lebanese have been killed since Israel stepped up airstrikes, according to government data. The statistics do not differentiate between Hezbollah fighters and civilians.
Although no evacuation orders were issued to residents in advance on Monday night, Israeli forces later said they were targeting “Hezbollah terrorist targets” without elaborating further.
First reports from the scene suggested that the compound of Rafik Hariri Hospital, the capital’s largest public hospital, had been attacked, but the Israeli army denied this.
The damage to the hospital was not serious, but across the road, a poor neighborhood was hit and filled with cars with their windows blown out.
Fouad’s son Ahmed joined us. He showed us a photo of his son lying in the hospital’s intensive care unit, his face bandaged and bloodied.
“This was my house; now it’s gone, like everything else. We have nowhere to go and no clothes. It’s a massacre. We have no base here, no Hezbollah, nothing,” Ay Hamed told us.
It’s unclear why the Israeli military chose to issue evacuation orders before some missile strikes but not others, but when Israel strikes densely populated areas without warning, casualties could be indiscriminate. And high.
Fouad told us he played with nearby children who were killed in the strike.
“Every time I go into the community, they shout: ‘Grandpa, Grandpa! What have you brought for us? I’ll give them candy, chips and popcorn. Their passing fills me with sadness; they all died. . Their mother and one of her children are still trapped under the rubble.
As we began to leave the scene, there was silence among those gathered and we watched as excavators removed a stretcher carrying a wrapped body.
We’re told a mother was found next to a child.
