Rihab Faour fled her home. Then she fled again. Then a third time. Then a fourth. And by the fourth time, a year after the first, she had been fleeing Israeli bombs for so long that nowhere in Lebanon felt safe.
Her journey had begun in October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel. That prompted Hezbollah, the Lebanese political and militant group, to fire rockets into Israel and Israel to retaliate by bombing southern Lebanon.
The Israeli bombs fell close enough to Rihab’s village that the 33-year-old and her husband Saeed, an employee of the municipal water company, gathered their daughters Tia, eight, and Naya, six, and fled to Rihab’s parents’ house in Dahieh, a suburb of the capital Beirut.
In Dahieh, for a while, life went on almost as normal, with the exception that Naya and Tia missed their friends, their own beds, their toys and all clothes they had had to leave behind.
Most of all they missed going to school, which had been replaced by online learning. They were excited when, back in August, Rihab enrolled them in a new school in Beirut and took them to buy brand new school uniforms.
But before their first day could arrive, Israel expanded its bombing of Lebanon to include parts of Beirut, particularly the Dahieh suburb that the family now called home.
Israel was assassinating senior Hezbollah figures in the suburb, but it was using large, bunker-busting bombs, each capable of destroying a residential building. In some strikes, Israel dropped dozens of these bombs in one go and flattened entire city blocks.
So the Faour family packed up and fled again, this time to a rented house in another Beirut neighbourhood, Jnah. After a powerful air strike in Jnah, they moved to Saeed’s parents’ house in the neighbourhood of Barbour. There, they lived with 17 others in a single house – people piled on people.
For Tia and Naya though, now nine and seven, it was a rare joy to be surrounded by their cousins day and night. So much so that even when Rihab’s father, a retired Lebanese army sergeant, found a rental apartment in the Basta neighbourhood just for the four of them, the girls did not want to go.
Six weeks later, Rihab was sitting in a stiff plastic chair in an apartment in Beirut, her eyes dark and her face drawn. She was still recovering from her surgeries – to install eight screws into her spine and another three into her arm. She had been lying down for a long time, and now she was trying to sit up more and to walk a little, though every movement caused her pain.
Naya’s eighth birthday had been four days earlier. Rihab was passing her time “either crying or sleeping”, she said. But she wanted to talk about her family.
Naya and Tea Faour were seven and nine when they were killed by an Israeli air strike. Saeed was 31. Rihab completed her undergraduate law degree and began studying for a masters, but the couple became engaged and then married, and soon Tia was born, so Rihab put her budding law career on hold.
Now, in the midst of her loss, she has tentatively begun to think of studying again. “I am going to need something to fill my days,” she said.
The temporary grave where Saeed, Naya and Tea were buried. The cemetery was badly damaged by an Israeli air strike.
Saeed and Tia were buried the day after they died, by Rihab’s father and uncles, in temporary wooden caskets in an unmarked grave in Dahieh. Two weeks later, the men of the family dug again in the same spot and buried Naya. Rihab’s uncle placed two sprigs of artificial cherry blossom atop the grave, for the two girls, and later someone else laid a wreath for a stranger buried beside them.
Then an Israeli air strike hit the building directly adjacent to the cemetery and the resultant blast wave and debris smashed gravestones and churned up the earth around them.
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