A Lebanese family planning their daughter’s wedding is killed in an Israeli strike on their home

Sarah El Deeb
| Associated Press

Beirut — The family’s WhatsApp group chat flew with constant messages. Israel has been increasing its airstrikes on villages and towns in southern Lebanon. Everyone was glued to the news.

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

His aunts decided to go to 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 army to evacuate or risk his life. After that, the discussion went silent. Ten minutes later, Gharib called his father. There was no response.

The Gharib family’s apartment was hit directly by an Israeli airstrike. The family did not have time to go out. Gharib’s father, Ahmed, a retired Lebanese army officer, his mother, Hanan, and his three sisters were all killed.

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

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

Gharib said his family has no connection to Hezbollah. The direct hit destroyed their apartment, while those above and below suffered only damage, suggesting that some part of the building was targeted. Gharib said it was his family’s house.

The strike was one of more than 1,600 people said Israel carried out on September 23, the first day of an intense bombardment of Lebanon it has carried out over the past month. More than 500 people were killed that day, a casualty figure not seen in a single day in Gaza for two weeks, said Emily Tripp, director of Airwars, a conflict monitoring group based in in London.

Israel has vowed to cripple Hezbollah to end more than a year of cross-border fire by the Iran-backed militant group, which began a day after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack sparked the Gaza war. It says its attacks target Hezbollah members and infrastructure. But there are also hundreds of civilians among the more than 2,000 people killed in the bombings in 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 Tire’s al-Housh district – has been hit by 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 their best friend, he said. Growing up, their father was often away, so he and his mother took care of the family.

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 October 12. But as tensions with Israel rose in September, Gharib’s plans to come home for the wedding were uncertain. She told him she would put it off until she could get there.

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

“She wasn’t meant to have her wedding. Instead, I paraded her as a bride in paradise,” said Gharib. On the day of the wedding, 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 younger sister Nour, 20, was studying to become a dietitian and was training to be a personal trainer. Gharib called her the “laughter of the house”.

There is nothing left of his family now, apart from a few pictures on his phone and social media posts.

“I’m so hurt. But I know that the pain will be the worst when I come to Lebanon,” Gharib said. “Not even a picture of them hangs on the walls. Their clothes are not there. Their smell is no longer in the house. The house is completely gone.”

“They took my family and their memories.”