Three floors below Batul lived Denise and Moheyaldin Al-Baba. Denise invited her brother Hisham to dinner that Sunday.
The impact of the blow was brutal, Hisham says.
“The second rocket knocked me to the floor…the whole wall fell on top of me.”
He spent seven hours under the rubble.
“I heard a voice from far away. People were talking. Screams and… “Cover her. Remove her. Pick up the stone. He is still alive. This is a child. Lift this child up.’ I mean… I thought to myself that I’m the last one who won’t find out about me.
When Hisham was finally rescued, he found his niece’s fiancé waiting to find out if she was alive. He lied to him and said she was fine. Her body was found three days later.
Hisham lost four members of his family – a sister, a brother-in-law and their two children. He told us that he had lost his faith and no longer believed in God.
To learn more about those who died, we analyzed data from the Lebanese Ministry of Health, video footage, social media posts, and conversations with survivors of the attack.
In particular, we wanted to question the IDF media’s response – immediately after the attack – that the apartment building was a Hezbollah command center. We asked the IDF several times what the command center was, but they did not provide an explanation.
So we began looking at social media, burial sites, public health records, and video footage of funerals to determine if a military link to Hezbollah was killed in the attack.
We could only find evidence that six of the 68 dead we identified were linked to Hezbollah’s military wing.
Hizbullah’s memorial photos use the label “mujahid”, meaning “fighter”, for the six men. Seniors, on the other hand, are referred to as “Qaida”, which means “commander” – and we did not find any such labels used by the group to describe those killed.
We asked the IDF if the six Hezbollah fighters we identified were the intended targets of the strike. This question was not answered.
