BEIRUT (AP) — The family WhatsApp group chat buzzed with constant messages. Israel was escalating its airstrikes on villages and towns in southern Lebanon. Everyone was glued to the news.

Reda Gharib woke up uncharacteristically early that day, Sept. 23. Living a continent away in Senegal, he scrolled through videos and pictures shared by his sisters and aunts of explosions around their neighborhood in Tyre, Lebanon’s ancient coastal city.

His aunts decided to leave for Beirut. His father, mother and three sisters had no such plans.

Then his father announced to the group that he had received a call from the Israeli military to evacuate or risk their lives. After that, the chat fell silent. Ten minutes later, Gharib called his father. There was no answer.

The Gharibs’ apartment had been directly hit by an Israeli airstrike. The family had no time to get out. Gharib’s father, Ahmed, a retired Lebanese army officer, his mother, Hanan, and his three sisters were all killed.

“The whole apartment was gone. It is back to bare bones. As if there was nothing there,” said Gharib, speaking from the Senegalese capital, Dakar, where he has been living since 2020.

The Israeli military said it struck a Hezbollah site hiding rocket launchers and missiles.

Gharib said his family had no connection to Hezbollah. The direct hit gutted their apartment, while those above and below suffered only damage, suggesting a specific part of the building was targeted. Gharib said it was his family's home.

The strike was one of more than 1,600 Israel said it carried out on Sept. 23, the first day of an intensified bombardment of Lebanon it has waged for the past month. More than 500 people were killed that day, a casualty figure not observed in Gaza on a single day until the second week, said Emily Tripp, director of London-based Airwars, a conflict monitoring group.

Israel has vowed to cripple Hezbollah to put an end to more than a year of cross-border fire by the Iranian-backed militant group that began the day after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack triggered the war in Gaza. It says its strikes are targeting Hezbollah’s members and infrastructure. But there are also hundreds of civilians among the more than 2,000 people killed in the bombardment over the past month — often entire families killed in their homes.

Since then, the street where the Gharib family lived — an area of shops, residential buildings and offices of international agencies in Tyre’s al-Housh district — has been battered with repeated airstrikes and is now deserted.

Gharib, 27, a pilot and entrepreneur, moved to Senegal in search of a better future but always planned to return to Lebanon to start a family.

He was close to his three sisters, the keeper of their secrets and best friend, he said. Growing up, their father was often away, so he and his mother took charge of family affairs.

The last time he visited his family was in May 2023, when his sister Maya, an engineering student, got engaged. She had planned to marry on Oct. 12. But as tensions with Israel grew in September, Gharib's plans to come home for the wedding were uncertain. She told him she would put it off until he could get there.

After the strike, her fiancé, also an army officer, found her body and those of the rest of her family in a hospital morgue in Tyre.

“She was not destined to have her wedding. We paraded her as a bride to paradise instead,” Gharib said. On the day the wedding was to have taken place he posted pictures of his sister, including her wedding dress.

His sister Racha, 24, was about to graduate as a dentist and planned to open her own clinic. “She loved life,” he said.

His youngest sister, Nour, 20, was studying to be a dietitian and prepping to be a personal trainer. Gharib called her the “laughter of the house.”

There is nothing left of his family now except for a few pictures on his phone and on social media posts.

“I am so hurt. But I know the hurt will be hardest when I come to Lebanon,” Gharib said. “Not even a picture of them remains hanging on the walls. Their clothes are not there. Their smell is no longer in the house. The house is totally gone."

"They took my family and the memories of them.”

News from © The Associated Press, 2024