A Lebanese family was organizing a Sunday gathering when an Israeli strike collapsed their building

AIN EL DELB, Lebanon – It was Sunday, family time for most of Lebanon, and Hecham al-Baba was visiting his sister. She insisted that he and their older brother stay for lunch, hoping to extend the warm reunion in stressful times.

The brother refused. Like many in Lebanon, he had lost sleep due to increasing Israeli airstrikes, so he took a nap.

Al-Baba, 60, stayed there during his annual visit from Germany to visit family in Lebanon. His sister Donize even convinced him to invite his old friend for coffee. He excitedly went into the bathroom to clean up before his guest arrived.

Within a few seconds, a huge bang shook the basement apartment. Al-Baba fell to the floor. Something hit him in the chest, knocking the wind out of him. He stood up and reached for the door, screaming his sister’s name. The second explosion threw him back to the floor. The bathroom ceiling – and the entire building above it – collapsed on his back.

An Israeli airstrike hit a six-story apartment building in Ain el Delb, a neighborhood on the outskirts of the coastal city of Sidon. The entire building fell down the slope and landed on the wall, taking with it 17 apartments full of families and guests. More than 70 people were killed and 60 were injured.

Israel said the September 29 attack targeted a Hezbollah commander and claimed the building was the group’s headquarters. It could not be independently confirmed whether any of the residents were members of Hezbollah.

In a video that appeared online in which he mourned one of the people believed to be in the building, he appeared in an old photo wearing a military uniform, a sign of his affiliation with Hezbollah.

Either way, experts say the strike illustrates Israel’s willingness to kill significant numbers of civilians in pursuit of a single goal. This tactic has resulted in a high death toll among Palestinians in Gaza in Israel’s year-long campaign against Hamas.

Israel stepped up its bombardment of Lebanon from September 23, vowing to cripple Hezbollah, which began shelling northern Israel after the October 7 Hamas attack sparked the Gaza war. Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah members and infrastructure and also says the group is placing military assets in civilian areas.

About 2,000 people were killed, including Hezbollah fighters and commanders, but also hundreds of civilians, often in house strikes.

“It seems to be an area so similar to Gaza that these are families dying together in single strikes,” said Emily Tripp, director of the London-based conflict monitoring group Airwars.

In the first week of Israel’s escalation, it struck a house in Tire province, killing a family of 15, including all women and children except a Hezbollah member. The Byblos strike killed six family members of a Hezbollah fighter who had been killed in fighting a month earlier, raising questions about the quality of intelligence used in the strikes. The attack on a hut where families of Syrian migrant workers lived killed 23 people.

The Ain el Delb strike was one of the deadliest of the Israeli campaign. Among the dead were al-Baba’s sister, her husband and their two children, a 20-year-old daughter and a teenage boy.

Al-Baba was trapped for hours, with rubble pressing him into a painful kneeling position, his neck broken and his face stuck to the bathroom floor, unable to feel his legs. He knew his sister’s family was dead thanks to their phones constantly ringing with no answer.

“Nobody said a word. I didn’t hear any movement,” he said.

People don’t know. “Israel knows”

The Israeli military said it had put evacuation procedures in place before taking action based on confirmed intelligence about the Ain el Delb strike. Residents who spoke to The Associated Press said they received no warning.

“I wish we had it. We would have left,” said Abdul-Hamid Ramadan, who lived on the top floor and whose wife Jinan and daughter Julia were killed. “I would lose my house. But not my wife and daughter.

Israel says it often issues evacuation orders before a strike. But in Lebanon, as in Gaza, human rights groups say advance warnings are often inadequate and come in the middle of the night or via social media.

Ramadan, a retired army officer, said he had no knowledge of Hezbollah members or weapons in the building where he has lived for more than 20 years.

No one expected that the area – where most of the inhabitants are Sunnis and Christians – would be on the list of Israeli targets. In the building, 15 of the 17 apartments were inhabited by long-time residents who knew each other. A week earlier, displaced people from the south began to arrive, seeking shelter with relatives in the building.

Al-Baba said his sister confided in him before she died that she was worried about the much-loved Shiite tenant, mainly because he was receiving guests. She feared he might be targeted by Israel and asked her brother if she should leave. She decided to stay because she had no idea where to go.

Neither al-Baba nor his sister knew anything about the tenant’s ties to Hezbollah.

The Israeli strikes have raised concerns among Lebanese that their building could be hit for hosting a person who Israel rightly or wrongly claims is affiliated with Hezbollah. The building authorities asked tenants to provide the names of shelters for displaced people. Some refused to accept people from the south.

The first attack hit the lower floors of the building around 4 p.m. Ramadan’s family was shocked but did not think the building would collapse. Only Ramadan’s wife, Jinan, ran up the stairs. A few moments passed, long enough for Ramadan’s son Achraf to bring his sister Julia a glass of water to calm her down.

Then a second missile struck. The building swayed and then collapsed.

Ramadan fell off the couch, which, along with a nearby cabinet, protected him from the falling ceiling. Achraf, a fitness trainer and former soldier, hid under the door frame. Julka fell to the floor.

For what seemed like two hours, the three of them communicated through the rubble. Ramadan said Julia was only two meters away and her voice was faint but audible. Still holding the cell phone in his hands, he called for help.

When help arrived, Achraf got out first; then his father, about six hours after the strike. In the chaos, they thought Julia had been pulled out. However, rescuers returned and found the 28-year-old dead. Her mother died in hospital from internal bleeding.

“I lost the cornerstone of my home: my wife, my partner and my friend,” Ramadan said. “I lost my daughter Julia… She was my joy, my smile, my future.”

They are buried in unmarked graves in the part of the cemetery in Sidona dedicated to the victims of the Ain el Delb building.

As in Gaza, there are concerns that the civilian death toll is “quite high,” given that the alleged military target is often unspecified or relatively small, said Rich Weir, senior conflict, crisis and weapons researcher at Human Rights Watch.

He said there was an “escalation in the extent of damage… the demolition of entire buildings in densely populated residential areas, which creates inherent risks to civilians.” Israel also expanded its targets by targeting Hezbollah’s financial institutions, he said.

Ramadan was not surprised that so many people were killed for one potential Hezbollah member. This has happened before, he said.

“We hear on the news that the target was an apartment. And people wonder who it was,” he said. “People don’t know. Israel knows.”

“Worse than a Coffin”

At the bottom of the wreckage of the building, Hecham al-Baba was trapped in pitch darkness for four hours, pinned down with his legs bent. The falling door broke two of his ribs. It was difficult to breathe. All he could think about was that he might lose his legs.

“Blood wasn’t flowing to my legs,” he said. “I didn’t feel them. I couldn’t move. I tried to stay strong. I don’t want to remember. It annoys me.”

Finally he heard movement: people removing bricks, a bulldozer. He started screaming. His lungs and chest hurt. They shouted at him to shout louder. “I told them I couldn’t.”

Then a beam of light flashed through the hole in the darkness. When he saw him, the rescuer shouted, “What a stuck situation! It’s worse than a coffin.

Another four hours passed before rescuers pulled him head first through the floor beneath him, covered in dust and soot.

The entire rescue operation lasted over 43 hours. The Health Ministry put the death toll at 45, but Sidon’s civil defense chief, Mohamed Arkadan, said emergency services had recovered 73 bodies from the rubble. He added that the bodies of five people had still not been found.

Doctors told al-Baba that his ribs would heal in time.

But not his pain.

He said he would wear black all his life to mourn his sister. Past conflicts never prevented him from returning to Lebanon to visit his family. This time it might be a while before he comes back.

“There will be no peace,” he said, thinking about his family tragedy and the wars in Lebanon and Gaza. “No one will bring me justice. Nobody.”