The bomb explosion that killed three-year-old Céline Nassif’s parents and one of her two sisters threw her body so far that it may have saved her life. One of this girl’s few remaining relatives, her uncle Hassan, found her many meters from her house when he came when he heard the noise. The man handed her over to other people and then ran into the house to try to save his brother and the rest of his family. Of them, he says, “only pieces remained.”
Behind him, in the pediatric intensive care unit of Duris’ Dar al Amal University Hospital, 82 kilometers east of Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, Céline is bedridden. He has second-degree burns on a large part of his body, which also run across his face full of cuts. One of his eyebrows appears to be missing, he can barely close an eyelid, and his arms are bandaged. His left leg is in a cast up to the hip because the explosion caused an open fracture of the femur. “We had to give him morphine,” explains nurse Amal Haidar. Another health worker asks for silence. The girl sleeps and, when she wakes up, screams in pain. Or fear. Her uncle explains that if a noise wakes her from her lethargy, she utters terrifying screams, as if she were reliving the bombing she survived four days ago.
Céline’s village, Ain Burdai, is — along with Duris and the nearby town of Baalbek — within the red-painted area that appeared on a map of that region of the Bekaa Valley released Wednesday by the Israeli army’s Arabic spokesman. , Avichay Adraee, on his social network account against the interests” of Israel’s enemy in Lebanon: the Shiite militia party Hezbollah.
Céline and her family had no chance to escape. His house, like others, was bombed on Tuesday without prior warning, according to local authorities, one day before those eviction orders, the most massive since the intensification this summer of the latest wave of mutual attacks between Hezbollah and Israel, which Lebanese militia unleashed in October 2023 because of the war in Gaza.
In the hours before that bombing, Israeli attacks killed at least 67 people in the Bekah Valley, which became the deadliest day of the war in the eastern plain of Lebanon in which Hezbollah saw the light. in 1982. Part of that 182-kilometer-long plain is considered by Israel to be a breeding ground for Shiite militiamen and the rear base of the combatants who clash with its military in the strip surrounding the southern border of Lebanon, whose invasion Israel undertook on October 1st.
At least 150 people have died this week in the valley in Israeli attacks, 52 of them this Friday in the Baarbek-Hermel area, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health, which specifies that numerous attacks took place without prior warning and outside the area. that Israel had ordered to evacuate. According to the latest report from the Lebanese Government’s emergency committee, more than 10,000 people fled Baalbek and its surrounding areas on Thursday alone. Since the first Israeli announcement on Wednesday ordering the evacuation of that city, Duris and Ain Burdai, “80%” of its population has escaped, sources close to Hezbollah say. This party-militia organized a media visit to the area this Friday in which Morning Express participated.
gray powder
One of the ways to reach Baalbek, which before the war had about 82,000 inhabitants, is the road that passes through Duris. Some destroyed houses looked out on Friday on an asphalt in some sections covered with rubble from buildings pulverized by the bombings. One of them, attacked at dawn, was still smoking. In that building, a woman died, according to sources close to Hezbollah. Five children were also injured.
It’s hard to believe that no one can survive such destruction. Where there used to be a house, only iron remains, two cars melted by the explosion and debris sometimes smaller than a hand. The house next door also collapsed on one of its side walls and all the nearby buildings were covered in dark gray dust. Apparently, the same as shown in the photographs of those survivors rescued from the rubble of their bombed houses in Gaza, where in the long year that the war has lasted, more than 43,000 people have died. Added to these are the 2,800 deaths in Lebanon in the same period in Israeli attacks, according to the country’s Government.
“It’s not the cement of the destroyed house,” says a resident who approaches when he sees the group of journalists. That dust, the man says, “is something that bombs carry. “Don’t you notice a strange smell?” he says, referring to a peculiar, pungent smell, similar to that of tear gas and, like this, causing an immediate headache for those who inhale it.
That volatilized house, a hangar also pulverized, the burned cars—these due to drone shots, according to some residents—are the most visible trace of the push that Israel has given to the war in the Beca Valley, which it considers a bastion of Hezbollah. In Duris, the obviousness of the power of this militia is displayed in the yellow flags and posters with portraits of their leaders, many eliminated by Israel, that flank the route that leads to Baalbek. On another road in the valley, the face of Hasan Nasrallah, the general secretary of the organization assassinated on September 27, appears above the phrase with which that leader addressed his followers in some of his speeches: “Oh, honorable people.” .
Pride
The rich Roman archaeological site of Baalbek, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, reigns in the center of that city, now semi-deserted due to Israeli evacuation orders that have also closed hotels and restaurants once full of tourists. Among the few remaining residents there – almost all men – a group gathered on Friday in the Gouraud neighborhood. Some Shiite Muslim families, like the majority of the city’s inhabitants, have occupied in that neighborhood what were once military barracks from French colonization.
Ragged, wearing torn plastic flip-flops, many seem too poor to be able to flee anywhere. This does not seem to be the case of Abdo, a 19-year-old apprentice mechanic, who attributes his decision to stay to “pride”, but it does seem to be the case of Nizar Noon, who is 62 years old and punished.
This man has been left alone in his house. His family has fled and he says “he has nowhere to go.” Then he takes a small bottle of alcohol out of his pocket, takes a sip and recognizes that it helps him ward off fear. If in Lebanon as a whole poverty has tripled in the last decade to reach 44% of the population, according to the World Bank, in the region surrounding Baalbek, some calculations raise that percentage to more than 60%.
A few meters from Noon’s house, another house has been destroyed by an Israeli projectile. A fragment of a wall dating from the French protectorate, about 50 meters from the ruins of the Roman site, has also collapsed. That strange gray dust left by the bombs covers the rubble and destroyed houses. Suddenly, a loud explosion sounds from who knows where.
At the Dar al Amal hospital, where Céline lies in nearby Duris, nurse Haidar wondered this Friday who “will take care of the patients” if everyone leaves. At 21 years old, he had never seen children with war wounds until now. On September 23, seven minors arrived at their ICU. Six had to be intubated. Two others already brought in bodies, he says. Some were unrecognizable, “disfigured by burns”; others suffered serious head injuries. “Six of those children died,” he recalls.
