‘They were only civilians’: shock in Lebanon’s Nabatieh after Israel’s air strikes

Despatch: Attack on the town was the bloodiest day for civilians in the country since the latest war began at the border

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For the Berjaouii family, it was a normal day – as normal as it could be with a war raging only a few kilometres away from their house in Nabatieh, in the south of Lebanon.

Hussein and his wife, Amal, had invited seven of their family members for dinner.

Lebanon’s southern border has witnessed intense fighting since October 8, when Iran-backed Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, opened a second front against Israel to divert its forces from their onslaught on the Gaza Strip.

Until recently, Nabatieh had been spared the violence.

The city, located relatively far from the border, is theoretically outside an area where unwritten rules of engagement between the two sworn enemies apply.

Both sides have tried to limit escalation amid on-and-off clashes over the years, since a devastating, month-long war in 2006 that killed about 1,200 people in Lebanon.

But the rules have been loosely respected lately.

At about 9pm, as the family was sitting around the table, several Israeli air strikes struck the building, killing seven family members.

Only the son-in-law, Ali Amer, and his three-year-old son, Hussein, survived. A viral video shows a young boy covered in blood being rescued from the rubble at night.

“They were civilians. Hussein was a mechanic. If anything, he was scared of the bombs. I didn’t expect their house to be targeted, but I’m not surprised at all, considering what Israel is doing in Gaza, targeting hospitals and schools,” said a family member who declined to give his name.

The man was among a group of people gathered to watch the rescue efforts on Thursday evening, hours after the tragedy happened, searching for bodies in the rubble of the partially destroyed building. At the back of the building, the contents of several apartments were scattered across the muddy ground.

Israel said it struck a “Hezbollah military structure” in Nabatieh that night and killed a number of Hezbollah fighters, including a commander in the group’s elite Radwan Force, Ali Mohammed Debs and his deputy.

Hezbollah on Thursday confirmed the deaths of three of its fighters, including Mr Debs, without giving their ranks.

It did not comment on the killing of the family in the strike on Wednesday.

That day, at least 10 civilians were killed, including the Berjaoui family in Nabatieh, and a mother and her two children in Sawaneh, in separate Israeli air strikes across Lebanon.

This was the bloodiest day for civilians in Lebanon since the war started, marking a serious escalation in terms of the number of civilians killed and injured and the depth of the strikes within Lebanon, reaching as far as 35km from the border.

Cross-border violence has claimed the lives of at least 254 people on the Lebanese side, most of them Hezbollah fighters, but also 40 civilians, according to an AFP tally. On the Israeli side, 10 soldiers and six civilians have been killed, according to the Israeli army.