Paramedics recall horror of Israeli strike on northern Lebanon

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Mansour Dahdah has been employed by Lebanon’s Civil Defence for 38 years and has witnessed crime scenes, mangled car wrecks and the aftermaths of tragic accidents.
But the head of the team for northern Lebanon’s Zgharta district says he has never seen anything as gruesome as the site of Monday’s Israeli strike on a house in Aitou village that killed 23 people.
“22 bodies last night. And then this morning we pulled out the body of an infant from the bed of a pick-up lorry – no more than 6 or 7 months old,” Mr Dahdah told The National on Tuesday. “He may have been thrown there by the force of the blast.” Only six people survived.
The strike on Aitou, a village in Christian-majority Zgharta, was Israel’s first attack on the area and one of the northernmost in Lebanon since the conflict started in October last year. So far, the focus of Israeli military strikes on Lebanon has been in the south, the eastern Bekaa Valley, and parts of Beirut.
Lebanon’s National News Agency reported the strike had targeted a residential building. One resident told The National the house was sheltering a displaced family, including women and children, who had fled Israel’s relentless bombing in the country’s south.
Monday’s attack levelled the house, which Mr Dahdah said was detached but still close to other residential buildings. “During the first few hours of the search and rescue, there were bodies everywhere,” he said. “The dust and rubble were so bad we couldn’t tell faces apart from bodies, never mind gender from gender.”
Mr Dahdah stated that he was aware of at least two children who were killed in the strike but the number could be higher. He himself pulled out the remains of a toddler. “We found the child, around two years old, under the body of his father near the wall of the garden. I pulled out a leg. My colleague pulled out the rest of the child.”
The owner of the house, Elie Alawan, said he had last week rented his three-storey house to members of the Hijazi family — two men, six women — from south Lebanon’s Aitaroun after their home had been destroyed by Israeli bombardment. Other family members joined the original crew until the house was filled with around 21 people.
“They were good, respectful people. They never made any problems. I knew them personally,” he said.
Mr Alawan added he had a professional relationship with the family, who owned a construction equipment company he often purchased equipment from. Residents told him that about seven other people arrived to visit the family at the house “around 15 minutes or so before the Israeli strike”.
He said he didn’t know whether the Israeli strike had targeted the visitors who had arrived minutes earlier.
Mr Alawan’s brother and next-door neighbor, Dani, interjected to say, “The strike clearly targeted the house since the entire structure came tumbling down.”
Photos taken shortly after the attacks show a flattened apartment building, with Lebanese Red Cross workers sifting through the rubble, where dust-covered body parts lay buried.
The Israeli army did not issue a warning before the strike and has yet to release a statement. Israel escalated its military campaign in Lebanon with heavy air strikes and ground troop incursions late last month, after nearly a year of low-level cross-border exchanges of fire with the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah. The Israeli army on Monday ordered the residents of 25 villages in southern Lebanon to leave and move to areas north of the Awali river.
Since the conflict started last October, more than 2,300 people have been killed in Israeli strikes in Lebanon, at least half of them in the past month since Israel started an all-out war. The fighting has also displaced an estimated 1.2 million people.