Families across Lebanon are searching for missing relatives and mourning loved ones after Israel dropped 160 bombs throughout the country in ten minutes on 8 April. The strikes hit hundreds of residential buildings without warning.
The barrage came hours after the United States and Iran announced a two-week ceasefire. But while Iran and Pakistan, the mediator, said the ceasefire included Lebanon, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it did not. Israel began bombarding Lebanon hours later, including the capital of Beirut. The death toll has already risen to over 300, yet dozens of corpses remain unidentified.
Outside of the American University of Beirut Hospital, relatives of the injured and deceased were waiting outside the entrance to receive news of loved ones. Some said their parents were in the operating room after suffering shrapnel wounds to their heads. Others told The New Arab they were waiting for the results of a DNA test to confirm the identity of loved ones. Many of the corpses retrieved from the rubble are burned beyond recognition. Abbas, 50, said that he came to the hospital to comfort the mother and father of three small children, between the ages of five and 12, believed to be dead. The parents were inside the hospital doing a DNA test to find out if any of the unidentified corpses brought to the morgue were their children. "The Israelis think they are strong by bombing innocent people from the air, but why don't they go fight [Hezbollah] in the south if they are so strong?" Abbas told TNA , noticeably angry. No justification During the strikes, Israel's army spokesperson, Avichay Adraee, tried to justify the indiscriminate killing. In a post on X , he claimed that Hezbollah targets relocated from predominantly Shia areas in southern Beirut—bustling residential neighbourhoods which he described as "Hezbollah strongholds"—to areas where civilians from many religious backgrounds live. Adraee did not provide evidence for his claim. Yet even if he did present credible evidence, bombing residential buildings and neighbourhoods violates international humanitarian law—the main framework regulating conduct in war—due to the disproportionate number of civilians killed, according to Nadim Houry, an expert on human rights and the executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative. "It's not enough for Israel to say that there was some Hezbollah guy drinking coffee, so we took out the entire block," he told The New Arab . "And if there were no legitimate target to begin with, then that would be a greater violation. It would be a war crime."
Beyond the legal implications, Israel's disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks ruptured and killed entire families, say witnesses and survivors. One 12-year-old girl, who requested anonymity, was grieving outside Rafik Hariri Hospital, one of the main medical facilities treating the injured and receiving the deceased in Beirut . She said that over 20 of her relatives died when Israeli strikes brought down entire apartment buildings in southern Lebanon.
The young girl was with her sister and mother in an adjacent apartment building when the attacks started. The blasts shattered windows in the neighbourhood and hurt her ears. And while she survived, many of her cousins of similar age weren't as lucky. "I'll miss them," she said. "I remember [fondly] how they used to come over to my apartment to play with me and how we would go and spend an entire day near the local kiosk together." Search and rescue As bombs rained down on Beirut, loved ones across the city texted back and forth to reassure one another. Those who couldn't be reached were feared to be dead. Kareem, 26, was working in a Sushi restaurant in the bustling neighbourhood of Hamra when he heard that his uncle's building was hit in a nearby neighbourhood. He told TNA that he tried to call him several times but received no answer. "I think he's dead. The entire building collapsed," he said, on the night of the attack. "A member from our family is heading to the scene of the strike now to give us some news." By the next morning, rescue workers said that scores of people had been killed in that same strike and that two corpses were still trapped under the rubble. Mahr Kardee, a member of the Civil Defence rescue team, said that he was working throughout the night to dig for survivors. Standing next to a bulldozer and a mound of rubble, he told TNA that he hadn't slept a single hour since the strikes started. He added that nobody from his team is scared to rescue the wounded despite Israel systematically targeting emergency workers . Israel has already killed 56 medics since it expanded its war against Lebanon on 2 March. He then cited the Quranic verse: "Whoever saves one life, it is as if he saved all of humanity."
Kardee added that many of the bodies recovered from deep beneath the rubble were "martyrs." "We sent the injured and the dead to the hospitals right away… I recovered 10 corpses from just one of the sites that were hit," he said, with resignation. Sabotaging a ceasefire? Analysts believe Israel intensified its assault on Lebanon to try to torpedo the ceasefire deal by provoking a retaliation from Hezbollah or Iran. "I think there was a desire to do something so outrageous to cause the ceasefire and negotiations to fail," said Houry, from the Arab Reform Initiative. He added that Israel has a history of terrorising civilians ahead of a ceasefire.
During the Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006, the former dropped thousands of cluster munitions over Lebanon , which altogether contained between 2.6 and 4 million submunitions. The UN later said that at least 1 million of these munitions didn't detonate, posing an acute threat to civilians and requiring sprawling demining efforts. More recently, Israel escalated attacks against civilians shortly before ceasefires were supposed to go into effect in Gaza and Lebanon. Houry says that Israel clearly aimed to hurt civilians irrespective of their broader political calculations. "Judging from the pattern of attacks and the sites they targeted, [Israel] wanted to inflict deliberate harm on Lebanese civilians," he told TNA .