She fled Israel’s bombing of Lebanon four times. It still found her

Rehab Faure ran away from her home. Then she ran away again. Then a third time. Then the fourth. And for the fourth time, a year after the first, she was fleeing Israeli bombs, nowhere safe in Lebanon.

Her journey began in October 2023 when Hamas attacked Israel. This prompted the Lebanese political and militant group Hezbollah to fire rockets into Israel and Israel to retaliate by bombing southern Lebanon.

Israeli bombs fell close enough to Rihab’s village that the 33-year-old and her husband Saeed, an employee of the municipal water company, fled to the home of their daughters Tia, eight, and Naya, six, and Rihab’s parents. , a suburb of the capital Beirut.

In Daheeh, for a while, life went on almost as normal, except that Naya and Tia had lost their friends, their own beds, their toys, and all the clothes they had left behind.

Most of all they missed going to school, which was replaced by online learning. In August, Rihab was excited when he was admitted to a new school in Beirut and was taken to buy brand new school uniforms.

But before their first day arrived, Israel expanded its bombing of Lebanon to include parts of Beirut, especially the Daheeh suburb that the family now calls home.

Israel was killing senior Hezbollah figures in the suburbs, but it was using large, bunker-busting bombs, each capable of destroying a residential building. In some strikes, Israel dropped dozens of these bombs at once and leveled entire city blocks.

So the Faure family packed up and fled again, this time to a rented house in Znah, another Beirut neighborhood. After a heavy airstrike in Jnah, they moved to Saeed’s parents’ house in the neighborhood of Barbar. There, he lived with 17 others in one house – people piled up.

Tia and Naya, now nine and seven, were surrounded by their cousins ​​day and night, a rare joy. So much so that when Rihab’s father, a retired Lebanese army sergeant, found a rented apartment for just the four of them in the Basta neighborhood, the girls didn’t want to go.

“Naya begged us to stay there with all the family,” Rihab recalled. “We told her we were going to spend one night in this new house, then we’d go straight back to the family and all the kids.”

And he offered the girls a bargain – come stay in the new apartment and you can choose your dinner. So on the way home they stopped for rotisserie chicken and other treats from a shop, and around 7.30pm, with the streets still alive with people, the family pulled into a rundown building in Basta in central Beirut.

In 2006, during the previous war between Israel and Hezbollah, bombing was limited to a few areas of Lebanon – the south, Daheeh and some infrastructure targets. During this time, as senior members of Hezbollah spread across the country, Israel bombed wherever they went.

It brought bombs to places previously thought to be safe, including parts of central Beirut.

None of it weighed on Tia and Naya as the family unloaded their belongings into the new apartment. For now, the girls were more concerned with returning to their cousins ​​at the earliest opportunity.

Unlike Saeed’s parents’ home, the new Basta apartment had running water and a generator for electricity. The girls were happy to see that the family finally got their own place. Rihab and Saeed felt a little relieved. Mostly, an Israeli drone was buzzing overhead, but the noise was so common in Beirut that it was possible to tune it out.

Rehab put food and treats on the table. “We sat down to eat and we were talking and laughing,” he said. “And that, is my last memory of them.”

Bomb It was a US-made Jdam. On October 10, at 8pm, the building was struck half an hour after the family arrived. It leveled all three floors and destroyed parts of adjacent buildings and cars, and Killed 22 men, women and childrenIt was the deadliest strike in central Beirut since the fighting began a year ago.

The Israeli military gave no warning before the strike, so the building was filled with people. Israel reportedly targeted Wafiq Safa, head of Hezbollah’s Coordination and Liaison Unit, but Safa was never reported among the dead. He survived, or he wasn’t there to begin with. The IDF declined to comment on the strike or the lack of warning ahead of it.

Rihab woke up in Beirut’s Zahra Hospital, unable to move. Her back and arm were badly injured and she needed at least two operations. She went in and out of consciousness. Between laughing with the girls at dinner and waking up in the hospital, her mind was blank.

As she slept that night, her family searched Beirut’s hospitals. By midnight, Saeed and Tiya were found dead. DNA tests are needed to confirm that Naya was killed, as was another girl her age who was brought to the same hospital, as their injuries prevented direct identification.

His rehab doctor advised him not to tell the family about it. He worried that the news would be too much for her, who was still facing significant surgery. So for two weeks, she underwent surgery and then recovered, her mother Basima assured her that Saeed and the girls were being treated at different hospitals.

But Rehab sensed something was wrong and started forcing her to look at pictures and videos of girls. “She could feel it in her heart,” Basima said.

Eleven days after the strike, a DNA test confirmed that Tia had died, and on the 15th, a hospital psychiatrist told her that Saeed and the girls had gone to rehab.

Six weeks later, Rihab sat in a hard plastic chair in her apartment in Beirut, her eyes black and her face drawn. She was still recovering from her surgery – to have eight screws inserted into her spine and three into her arm. She had been sleeping for a long time, and now she was trying to sit more and walk a little, although every movement caused her pain.

Naya’s eighth birthday was four days ago. She said her time in rehab was spent “crying or sleeping.” But she wanted to talk about her family.

“Naya was very attached to me, she followed me wherever I went. Tia loved her grandparents and was happy if I left her with them. Both girls loved drawing, playing with toys, and avoided going to school. He had teachers and students playing together for hours.

Most of all they loved watching videos together on TikTok. Rihab and Saeed thought they were still too young to post their own videos online, so Rihab would film them dancing and playing and tell the girls who were posting on the app, which seemed to satisfy them.

Saeed entered rehab in 2013. Rihab grew up in Beirut but her family used to visit the village of Mays el Jabal in the summer because the air was cooler there and the village was surrounded by countryside, and that summer she met Saeed. Mutual friends.

Rihab completed her undergraduate law degree and began postgraduate studies, but the couple became engaged and then married, and soon after Tia was born, so Rihab put her budding legal career on hold.

Now, in the midst of her loss, she has tentatively begun to consider studying again. “I need something to fill my days,” he said.

The day after Saeed and Tiya died, they were buried in makeshift wooden boxes in an unmarked grave in Daheeh, by Rihab’s father and uncle. Two weeks later, the men of the family dug again at the same spot and buried Nyaya. Rehab’s uncle placed two sprigs of artificial cherry blossoms on the graves for the two girls, and then someone else laid a garland for the stranger who was buried next to them.

An Israeli airstrike then hit a building directly adjacent to the cemetery, and the resulting blast wave and debris shattered gravestones and churned the earth around them. At the same time, another Israeli airstrike hit the family’s home in Dahih, destroying several items Rihab wanted to keep, including two new, unworn school uniforms.

After a while, it was all over. A ceasefire announced last week allowed thousands of displaced people to return to their villages in southern Lebanon. Rihab and Saeed’s village was heavily bombed by the Israelis and their family home there was destroyed, but Rihab cannot return home anyway, as she will be backpacking for several more months and unable to travel.

As jubilation spread across Lebanon at news of a ceasefire, new images emerged of Wafiq Safa, the reported target of the bomb that killed Saeed, Tee, Naya and 19 others. Safa has not been seen in public since the strike, but he appears alive and well.

Additional reporting by Joanna Mazjoub