He escaped Israel’s invasion of Lebanon four times. It still finds him

Rihab Faour ran away from his home. He ran away again. Then the third time. And then the fourth. And by the fourth time, a year after the first, he had been dodging Israeli bombs for so long that nowhere in Lebanon felt safe.

His journey began in October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel. That prompted Hezbollah, a political and militant group in Lebanon, to fire rockets into Israel and Israel to retaliate by bombing southern Lebanon.

Israeli bombs fell so close to Rihab’s village that a 33-year-old man and his husband Saeed, an employee of the municipal water company, gathered their daughters Tia, 8, and Naya, six, and fled to Rihab’s parents’ house in Dahieh. , a suburb of the capital Beirut.

In Dahieh, for a while, life continued almost as normal, except that Naya and Tia missed their friends, their beds, their toys and all the clothes they had had to leave behind.

Above all they miss going to school, which has been replaced by online learning. They were happy when, back in August, Rihab enrolled them in a new school in Beirut and took them shopping for brand new school uniforms.

But before their first day arrived, Israel expanded its attack on Lebanon to include parts of Beirut, especially the Dahieh neighborhood that the family called home.

Israel was killing top Hezbollah figures in the suburbs, but was using large, high-explosive bombs, each capable of destroying a residential building. In some strikes, Israel dropped dozens of these bombs at once and flattened an entire city.

So the Faour family packed up and fled again, this time to a rented house in another area of ​​Beirut, in Jnah. After the heavy air strike in Jnah, they moved to Saeed’s parents’ house in Barbour area. There, they lived with 17 others in the same house – overcrowded.

However, for Tia and Naya, now nine and seven, it was a rare joy to be surrounded by their cousins ​​day and night. So much so that even when Rihab’s father, a retired Lebanese army sergeant, found an apartment for rent in the Basta area that was suitable for the four of them, the girls did not want to go.

“Naya begged us to stay there with the whole family,” remembers Rihab. “We told him that we have to spend one night in this new house, and then return to the family and all the children.”

And he gave the girls an advantage – come live in a new apartment and you can choose your dinner. So on the way home they stopped for rotisserie chicken and other delicacies at a shop, and at around 7.30pm, with the streets still full of people, the family went up to a deserted building in Basta in central Beirut.

Back in 2006, during the previous war between Israel and Hezbollah, the bombing was limited to certain areas of Lebanon – in the south, Dahieh, and other areas where infrastructure was targeted. This time, as the top members of Hezbollah spread across the country, Israel bombed them wherever they went.

This brought the bombs to areas that were thought to be safe, including parts of central Beirut.

None of this bothered Tia and Naya as the family unloaded their belongings into the new house. At the moment, the girls were very worried about getting back to their cousins ​​as soon as possible.

Unlike Saeed’s parents’ house, Basta’s new apartment had running water and an electricity generator. The girls were happy when they saw that the family now had their own place. Rihab and Saeed relaxed a bit. There may have been a special Israeli plane screeching loudly, but the noise was so common in Beirut that it was impossible to tune it out.

Rihab put food and snacks on the table. “We sat down and ate and talked and laughed,” he said. “And that was it, my last memory of them.”

A bomb it was a Jdam made in the US. It hit the building on October 10 at 8 p.m., half an hour after the family arrived. It leveled all three floors and destroyed parts of buildings near cars, too 22 men, women and children diedmaking it the deadliest strike in central Beirut since fighting began last year.

The Israeli army did not issue a warning before the strike, so the building was full of people. It is reported that Israel was targeting Wafiq Safa, the head of Hezbollah’s coordination and coordination unit, but Safa did not report that he was among the dead. He was alive, or he wasn’t in the first place. The IDF declined to comment on the strike or the lack of warning before it.

Rihab woke up in Beirut’s Zahraa Hospital, unable to move. His back and arm were badly injured and he needed at least two surgeries. He went in and out of his mind. Everything on his mind between laughing with his daughters at dinner and waking up in the hospital was blank.

While he lay there that night, his family searched the hospitals of Beirut. By midnight, we knew that Saeed and Tia were dead. DNA testing will be needed to confirm that Naya was killed, along with another girl her age who arrived at the same hospital, as their injuries prevented direct identification.

Rihab’s doctors advised the family not to tell him anything about this. They were worried that, as they were still facing major surgery, the news would weigh heavily on him. He went to surgery for two weeks and then he recovered from his surgery, his mother Basima assured him that Saeed and the girls were treated in different hospitals.

But Rihab felt that something was wrong, and started to insist on looking at pictures and videos of girls. “He could feel it in his heart,” said Basima.

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

Six weeks later, Rihab was sitting on a hard plastic chair in a Beirut apartment, her eyes black and her face drawn. He was still recovering from his surgery – to put eight screws in his spine and three more in his arm. He had been lying on the ground for a long time, and now he was trying to sit up and walk slowly, although every movement was painful.

Naya’s eighth birthday was four days earlier. Rihab was passing his time “even if he was crying or sleeping”, he said. But he wanted to talk about his family.

“Naya loved me very much, she followed me wherever I went. Tia loved her grandparents and was happy when I left her with them. Both girls loved to draw, loved to play with toys, and missed going to school. They played together, teacher and student for hours.”

Most of all they loved watching videos together on TikTok. Rihab and Saeed thought they were too young to upload their videos online, so Rihab would film them dancing and playing and tell the girls he was uploading them to the app, which seemed to satisfy them, for now.

Saeed entered Rihab’s life in 2013. Rihab grew up in Beirut but his family visited the village of Mays El Jabal in the summer, because the air was cool there and the village was surrounded by countryside, and that summer he met Saeed different friends.

Rihab completed his law degree and began studying for a master’s, but the couple got engaged and married, and Tia was soon born, so Rihab put her budding legal career on hold.

Now, amid his loss, he has begun to think about re-learning. “I’m going to need something to fill my days,” she said.

Saeed and Tia were buried the day after their deaths, by Rihab’s father and uncle, in makeshift wooden coffins in an unmarked grave in Dahieh. Two weeks ago, the men of the family dug again in the same place where they buried Naya. Rihab’s uncle placed two branches of artificial cherry blossoms on the grave, for the two girls, and later someone laid a wreath for the stranger buried next to them.

Then an Israeli air strike hit a building directly adjacent to the cemetery and the resulting blast wave and debris shattered the tombstones and shook the earth around them. Around the same time, another Israeli airstrike hit the family’s home in Dahieh, destroying many of the things Rihab wanted to keep, including two unworn new school uniforms.

Before long, it was over. A ceasefire announced last week has 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’s home was destroyed, his uncle said, but Rihab can’t return home anyway, because he will stay for several months and can’t walk.

As excitement spread across Lebanon over the news of the ceasefire, new images emerged of Wafiq Safa, who was reportedly the target of the bomb that killed Saeed, Tea, Naya and 19 others. Safa has not been seen in public since the strike, but he seemed to be doing well.

Additional reporting by Joanna Mazjoub