‘Whole neighbourhood wiped out’ in Israel air strike

When the air strike hit on Monday night, Fouad Hassan, 74, was sitting on his balcony in south Beirut’s Jnah neighbourhood, reading his phone.

No evacuation order was given by the Israeli army before the rocket slammed into the home of his children and grandchildren a short walk away.

“When the bombing happened, I fainted,” Fouad says. “I was taken to get oxygen due to the smoke from the strike. When I got better, I realised that the entire neighbourhood was devastated.”

Now a pile of mangled steel and masonry lies where a number of residential buildings stood closely together. Where buildings are still standing, people’s possessions can be seen inside through holes blasted in the walls.

A digger and about 40 local men are doing the slow work to excavate and look for bodies under the rubble.

“Look at the destruction – a whole neighbourhood wiped out, the people here dead,” Fouad says, gesturing over the bomb site. “My granddaughter died here, and my grandson is still in a coma. Both were 23 years old.”

Fouad is a well-known figure in the community. An actor and comedian, he has appeared on Lebanese television and is known by his stage name Zaghloul. As we walk around the bomb site, locals come to shake Fouad’s hand and offer words of condolence.

Taking his phone from his pocket, Fouad shows us a picture of his granddaughter, Alaa. She looks confident, posing for the camera and wearing a smart gold dress.

“She was happily engaged, looking forward to getting married in three months,” Fouad says. “She applied to be Miss Lebanon and was shredded to pieces. Why? Why does the world allow this?”

Since Israel began escalating its air strikes against Hezbollah in September, rockets have hit across the length and breadth of the country. It is a military campaign that Israel’s leaders feel has been brought them huge wins so far – having claimed the lives of Hezbollah’s senior leadership.

However it is also a campaign that has taken many innocent lives, with numerous reports of entire families being killed in strikes around the country.

Over 1,900 Lebanese people have been killed, according to government figures, since Israel stepped up the air strikes. The statistics do not differentiate between Hezbollah fighters and civilians.

Despite issuing no evacuation order to residents in advance on Monday night, the Israeli army subsequently stated that they were aiming for a “Hezbollah terrorist target”, but did not elaborate further.

First reports coming from the scene suggested that the compound of the Rafik Hariri hospital, the capital’s largest public hospital, had been struck, which the Israeli army denied.

The damage to the hospital is superficial, but across a road littered with parked cars that have their windows blown out, lies a poor neighbourhood that was hit.

Fouad’s son, Ahmed joins us. He shows us a picture of his son who lies in intensive care in the hospital, his face bandaged and bloody.

“This was my house; it’s gone now, just like everything else. We have no place to go and no clothes. This is a massacre. We have no base here, no Hezbollah, there’s nothing,” Ahmed tells us.

It is not clear why its army chooses to issue evacuation orders before some missile strikes and not others – but when Israel does strike without warning in a dense residential area, the human cost can be indiscriminate and high.

Fouad tells us of playing with the young children in the neighbourhood who were killed in the strike.

“Whenever I entered the neighbourhood, they would shout, ‘Grandpa, Grandpa! What did you bring us?’ I would give them candies, crisps, and popcorn. Their loss fills me with sorrow; they all died. Their mother is still trapped under the rubble with one of her children.”

As we begin to leave the site, a hush falls over those gathered and we see a stretcher carrying a wrapped body being taken away by the digger.

We are told that a mother was found next to a child.