From the beginning of Israel stepping up airstrikes against Hezbollah in Septemberrockets flew across the length and breadth of the country. Israel’s leaders feel that this is a military campaign that has brought them huge victories – taking the lives of Hezbollah’s top leadership.
However, it is also a company that has claimed many innocent lives, with many reports of entire families being killed in strikes across the country.
More than 1,900 Lebanese have been killed, according to government figures, since Israel stepped up airstrikes. The statistics do not distinguish between Hezbollah fighters and civilians.
Although residents were not ordered to evacuate Monday night, the Israeli army later said it had targeted a “Hezbollah terrorist target,” but did not elaborate.
Initial reports from the scene indicated a strike on the grounds of the Rafik Hariri Hospital, the capital’s largest public hospital, which the Israeli army denied.
The damage to the hospital is superficial, but across the street, littered with parked cars with broken windows, lies a poor, hard-hit neighborhood.
We are joined by Fuad’s son Ahmed. He shows us a picture of his son lying in the hospital’s intensive care unit with his face bandaged and covered in blood.
“This was my home; now it is gone, like everything else. We have nowhere to go and no clothes. This is a massacre. We don’t have a base here, we don’t have Hezbollah, we don’t have anything,” Ahmed tells us.
It is not clear why his army orders evacuations in the face of some missile strikes and not others – but when Israel strikes without warning in a densely populated residential area, the loss of life can be indiscriminate and high.
Fouad tells us how he played with the young children in the neighborhood who died during the strike.
“When I went to the neighborhood, they shouted: “Grandpa, grandpa! What did you bring us? I would give them candy, chips and popcorn. Their loss fills me with sorrow; they all died. Their mother is still under the rubble with one of her children.’
As we begin to leave the site, the crowd falls silent and we see an excavator carrying a stretcher with a wrapped body.
We are informed that the mother was found next to the child.
