Disbelief in Lebanese town of Barja after Israeli strikes turn home for displaced into graveyard

Coastal town is the latest to suffer deadly attack despite having no links to Hezbollah

The site of an Israeli strike in Barja which killed 35 people on Tuesday. Matt Kynaston for The National

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When the Israeli army bombed the Lebanese town of Barja, about a 40-minute drive south of Beirut, Ahmad Abou Bahiri was smoking shisha in his living room. On a quiet Tuesday evening, the last thing on his mind was that moments later, he would be desperately digging through the rubble of his home for his wife and children, who had been fast asleep in the next room.

Amid the debris and chaos, he found a leg. At first he thought it was his wife's. Later he realised it was from the four-storey building next door, which was the target of the attack. At least 35 people were killed, including children. The Lebanese civil defence found the body parts of four different people in Mr Abou Bahiri's bedroom.

“There were pieces of human flesh everywhere. Here you see, our neighbour was thrown from this house, up to there, you can see the trace of blood,” he said, pointing to a dark red stripe across the ceiling.

Mr Abou Bahiri said his family suffered only moderate injuries, despite their house being destroyed. “It's a miracle,” he said, still visibly shocked by what happened.

Barja is a Sunni-majority town in the Chouf district of Mount Lebanon, perched on a hilltop overlooking the Mediterranean. From here the coast snakes south to the border area where the Israeli army invaded last month. The town has been hit only once since Israel began carrying out air strikes across the country last month, and is far from the areas of south Lebanon where its troops are fighting the Lebanese Shiite armed group Hezbollah.

Israel has laid waste to much of Lebanon's Shiite heartlands, seen as Hezbollah's support bases, but increasingly Israel is striking outside of those areas.

As with many of Israel's attacks, there was no warning to civilians before the bombing in Barja on Tuesday. The victims are among the more than 3,000 people killed in Lebanon since Hezbollah and the Israeli military began exchanging cross-border fire in October last year, most of them since Israel launched a massive air campaign and ground invasion on September 23.

When The National visited Barja some 14 hours after the strike, rescuers were still searching through the rubble of the building. But they were not looking for survivors, only for more body parts. The smell of burnt flesh was overwhelming. Children’s toys, pokemon cards, drawing boards, homework and clothes littered the area. One rescuer tossed aside make-up and pencils as he searched. Another sprayed the area with a water cannon in an attempt to clear some of the mess, as families from nearby buildings watched from their balconies.

Moustafa Danaj, a member of the Civil Defence, said one of the bodies he recovered was a five-year-old girl who had been decapitated in the bombing. “We pulled out a lot of children,” he said. Staff at the Siblin Governmental Hospital told The National they had received the bodies of at least two children.

A home for displaced families

The building overlooked pristine football fields and basketball courts and had been rented out to Shia families who fled Israel's relentless bombing of the south. They had been there a month. Residents said they had not noticed anything out of the ordinary since the families moved in a month earlier.

The building's occupants included the Basma, Faqih and Hajij families, all related. According to posters released online by the municipality of Ain Baal, a southern town where the Basma family is from, 16 of its members were killed in the strike, most of them women and children, including a nine-year-old girl named Lynn. Her passport picture was found among the paperwork and ID documents scattered on the floor of Mr Abou Bahiri's flat, hurled there by the force of the blast.

The Israeli military claims its strikes are directed at Hezbollah members and weapons, but it has not issued a statement to clarify its target in Barja. This is not the first time an Israeli strike has caused high civilian casualties in supposedly safe areas without any obvious target; several deadly strikes in recent weeks remain unexplained, allowing rumours to fill the void.

Some local news outlets claimed, without evidence, that a Hezbollah member was living in the targeted building, which The National could not independently confirm. The group did not comment on the matter.

The Amal Movement, an ally of Hezbollah which has been fronting the group's ceasefire negotiations mediated by the US, published commemorative pictures of three “martyrs” from the Basma family, including a woman and two men, all in civilian clothing.

The images were different to those of the handful of fighters from Amal's small armed wing who have been killed. The latter are dressed in military fatigues with a specific mention of their military ranking. This shows that the family was merely politically affiliated with the party, rather than having any kind of military role.

Mr Abou Bahiri said the Lebanese army intelligence had taken away devices at the site which belonged to the displaced families to investigate the case.

“We saw nothing wrong; they were just ordinary families. I'm not personally someone involved in anything political and I don't care about religion. We welcomed them with all our humanity,” Mr Abou Bahiri said.

“We didn't expect this, so of course it’s scary, now we’re afraid of any newcomers in the region,” said Rayan, one of the neighbours who declined to give her last name.

Bilal Abdullah, a local MP from the Progressive Socialist Party which largely represents Lebanon's Druze community, said there had been an increase in attacks on the Mount Lebanon governorate – a non-Shiite area with no Hezbollah affiliation.

This has sparked fears among locals that they might inadvertently be hosting displaced Shiite families with ties to the group.

But Mr Abdullah said the Lebanese would not allow Israel to stoke sectarian strife, which embroiled the country in a devastating 15-year civil war from 1975 to 1990, splitting it along sectarian lines with Israel backing some of the factions. “We are unified," he said.

“Even if we have some political issues, political differences. But to be unified in Lebanon – we will fight for this. We will not allow Israel to create civil war in Lebanon again.”

“I think they [Israel] are following everyone who is related to Hezbollah. Even when it is only suspected. For them, they are allowed to kill people, even if they only suspect somebody without any proof.”

Mr Abdullah does not rule out that some people displaced by the war may have links to Hezbollah, but says that is beside the point.

“It doesn’t change the fact that they are women, children, elderly. Small children were killed yesterday.”