6 hours agoNawal al-MaghafiSenior international investigations correspondent, BBC World ServiceBBCJulia Ramadan was terrified – the war between Israel and Hezbollah was escalating and she’d had a nightmare that her family home was being bombed. When she sent her brother a panicked voice note from her apartment in Beirut, he encouraged her to join him in Ain El Delb, a sleepy village in southern Lebanon.”It’s safe here,” he reassured her. “Come stay with us until things calm down.”Earlier that month, Israel intensified air campaigns against Hezbollah in Lebanon, in response to escalating rocket attacks by the Iran-backed armed group which had killed civilians, and displaced tens of thousands more from homes in northern Israel.Ashraf was confident their family’s apartment block would be a haven, so Julia joined him. But the next day, on 29 September, it was subject to this conflict’s deadliest single Israeli attack. Struck by Israeli missiles, the entire six-storey building collapsed, killing 73 people.The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) says the building was targeted because it was a Hezbollah “terrorist command centre” and it “eliminated” a Hezbollah commander. It added that “the overwhelming majority” of those killed in the strike were “confirmed to be terror operatives”.But a BBC Eye investigation verified the identity of 68 of the 73 people killed in the attack and uncovered evidence suggesting just six were linked to Hezbollah’s military wing. None of those we identified appeared to hold a senior rank. The BBC’s World Service also found that the other 62 were civilians – 23 of them children.Among the dead were babies only a few months old, like Nouh Kobeissi in apartment -2B. In apartment -1C, school teacher Abeer Hallak was killed alongside her husband and three sons. Three floors above, Amal Hakawati died along with three generations of her family – her husband, children and two granddaughters.Ashraf and Julia had always been close, sharing everything with each other. “She was like a black box, holding all my secrets,” he says.On the afternoon of 29 September, the siblings had just returned home from handing out food to families who had fled the fighting. Hundreds of thousands of people in Lebanon had been displaced by the war.Ashraf was in the shower, and Julia was sitting in the living room with their father, helping him upload a video to social media. Their mother, Janan, was in the kitchen, clearing up.Then, without warning, they heard a deafening bang. The entire building shook, and a massive cloud of dust and smoke poured into their apartment.”I shouted, ‘Julia! Julia!,'” says Ashraf.”She replied, ‘I’m here.'”I looked at my dad, who was struggling to get up from the sofa because of an existing injury to his leg, and saw my mother running toward the front door.”Julia’s nightmare was playing out in real life.”Julia was hyperventilating, crying so hard on the sofa. I was trying to calm her down and told her we needed to get out. Then, there was another attack.”Video footage of the strike, shared online and verified by the BBC, reveals four Is …
