Fadi was praying on Wednesday afternoon when the ground began to shake. At first he thought it was an earthquake, but then he saw a plume of smoke rising from his house. He rushed home and began to dig. One by one, he pulled family members from the rubble, all eight of them killed in an Israeli airstrike.
“I pulled my brother out of the rubble in pieces. I found his four-year-old daughter’s hand in the branches of an olive tree 20 metres away,” he said. The owner of a gaming cafe in Bednayel, a town on the outskirts of the historic eastern Lebanese city of Baalbek, he asked only to be identified by his first name for fear of being targeted by the Israeli drones that circled overhead.
