Fadi was praying on Wednesday afternoon when the ground began to shake. At first he thought it was an earthquake, but then he saw a plume of smoke rising from his house. He rushed home and began to dig. One by one, he pulled family members from the rubble, all eight of them killed in an Israeli airstrike.
“I pulled my brother out of the rubble in pieces. I found his four-year-old daughter’s hand in the branches of an olive tree 20 metres away,” he said. The owner of a gaming cafe in Bednayel, a town on the outskirts of the historic eastern Lebanese city of Baalbek, he asked only to be identified by his first name for fear of being targeted by the Israeli drones that circled overhead.
The day before, Fadi’s brother Ali had asked him if his family could stay at his house since they lived next to a petrol station and he feared it would blow up in the event of an Israeli bombing; a local family had burned to death in an earlier Israeli bombing and Ali did not want his wife and two children to suffer the same fate.
All four were killed on Wednesday, along with Ali’s wife’s parents and two of her sisters.
Five hours before Fadi’s home was bombed, Israel’s military had ordered the residents of Baalbek and two nearby towns, Douris and Ain Bourday, to evacuate ahead of what it said were strikes on Hezbollah – the first time it had issued evacuation orders outside southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut.
But intense Israeli bombing had signalled that it was turning its focus to the eastern Bekaa valley two days before any evacuation orders were given. More than 60 people were killed on Monday last week in bombing across the valley, and by Friday the death toll from strikes in the region had surpassed 120.
Bednayel, like most of the villages surrounding Baalbek that were struck by Israel, was not included in the evacuation orders, nor did it receive a warning before being bombed.
“Israel’s goal is to get us to stop supporting Hezbollah – but we won’t. We’re proud to be here and we won’t leave,” Fadi said. He added that while his family supported Hezbollah politically, they were civilians and not a part of the organisation. He pulled a pair of baby socks out of his pocket, which belonged to his one-year-old nephew Hassan, and pointed to a pink ballet slipper in the rubble, which belonged to his niece Fatimah, to illustrate his point.
Hezbollah traditionally enjoys strong support in the Bekaa valley, it being where many of its top officials originated and where training camps for the organisation’s recruits were held. However, the valley is the largest geographic area of Lebanon and encompasses towns with many different political and religious affiliations.
In the city of Baalbek, the streets were deserted. Wednesday’s evacuation orders had caused panic, with tens of thousands of residents fleeing to safer areas, according to the city’s mayor, Moustapha al-Chall. At the centre of the city stood ancient ruins, including one of the world’s largest extant Roman temples, which was designated a world heritage site in 1982. The provincial governor instructed residents not to seek shelter near the ruins, as he could not guarantee they would be spared from bombing.
A nearby Israeli air raid on Monday had already damaged the Gouraud barracks, a structure from the French-mandate era built near the ancient Roman complex. The weathered stones that made up one of the walls of the complex had been shattered and strewn across the city’s streets.
Amir al-Nimr, a 21-year-old resident of Baalbek, was trapped under the debris on Monday after Israel dropped a bomb on his house, the same strike that damaged the barracks’ walls. He, unlike the other three members of his family who were in the house, survived the attack. But it left him with two fractured hips and burns all over his body.
“There was nothing in our home from Hezbollah. We had sent our women to Syria but we couldn’t leave because we needed to protect the house from theft. I’m not upset for my family, I’m upset that I didn’t get to join them in heaven,” Nimr said, his voice breaking as he spoke from a hospital bed in Dar al-Amal hospital in Douris.
His hair had been scorched from his scalp, one of his eyes was filled with blood and scabs had spread across his face like webbing where he had been burned. “From my point of view, this is a war against the Shia, you can see what regions of Lebanon they’re hitting. But no matter what happens, I won’t leave,” Nimr said.
Those who stayed behind despite the intensifying bombing on Baalbek and surrounding areas spoke with a sense of defiance. But the majority of residents have already left, joining the more than 1.2 million people already displaced by Israeli bombing in Lebanon.
About half of the 700 staff members at the Dar al-Amal hospital have left, displaced by fighting and fearful of an evacuation order that just barely includes the hospital. Three of its nurses were killed in Israeli strikes while off duty in the last month.
“Our main threat now is manpower. Our other resources are available and we can manage it,” said Ali Allam, the hospital’s director. The hospital has received much of the injured and dead from nearby bombings, as well as patients evacuated from hospitals closer to Baalbek.
Allam said that prior to last Monday, a sense of normalcy had returned to the hospital as the pace of Israeli bombing had slowed. That changed as Israel turned its sights on the Bekaa valley.
“Maybe the good thing is that in the Bekaa, the houses are spread far apart. Economically, it will be more costly for them to bomb us. They wouldn’t get their money’s worth. But who could stop them if they finish in south [Lebanon]?” Allam said with a grim smile.
