A Lebanese family was holding a Sunday meeting when an Israeli attack toppled their building

Within seconds, a huge bang shook the basement apartment. Al-Baba fell to the ground. Something hit him in the chest, leaving him breathless. He pulled himself up and reached for the door, shouting his sister’s name. A second explosion threw him back to the ground. The bathroom ceiling – and the entire building above it – collapsed on his back.

An Israeli airstrike hit the six-story residential building in Ain el Delb, a neighborhood outside the coastal city of Sidon. The entire building toppled down a hill and landed on its face, taking with it 17 apartments full of families and visitors. More than seventy people were killed and sixty injured.

Israel said the September 29 attack targeted a Hezbollah commander and claimed the building was a headquarters for the group. It could not be independently confirmed whether any of the residents belonged to Hezbollah.

In a video that emerged online in which he mourned one of the people believed to have lived in the building, he appeared in an old photo wearing military gear, a sign of affiliation with Hezbollah.

Regardless, experts say the attack illustrates Israel’s willingness to kill significant numbers of civilians in pursuit of a single goal. The tactic has fueled the high death toll among Palestinians in Gaza during Israel’s year-old campaign against Hamas.

Israel has intensified its bombing of Lebanon since September 23 and vowed to paralyze Hezbollah, which began firing into northern Israel after Hamas’ attack on October 7 sparked the war in Gaza. Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah members and infrastructure, saying the group is placing military assets in civilian areas.

About 2,000 people have been killed, including Hezbollah fighters and commanders – but also hundreds of civilians, often in attacks on homes.

“It seems to be a feature that is so similar to Gaza because we are talking about families being killed together in single attacks,” said Emily Tripp, director of the London-based conflict monitoring group Airwars.

In the first week of Israel’s escalation, a house in the province of Tire was hit, killing a family of fifteen people, all women and children, except for one Hezbollah member. An attack in Byblos killed six relatives of a Hezbollah fighter who had been killed in fighting a month earlier, raising questions about the quality of intelligence used in the attacks. An attack on a hut where Syrian migrant families lived killed 23 people.

The strike in Ain el Delb was one of the deadliest of the Israeli campaign. Among the dead were al-Baba’s sister, her husband and two of their children, a daughter in her 20s and a teenage boy.

Al-Baba was trapped for hours as rubble pressed him into a painful kneeling position, twisting his neck, gluing his face to the bathroom floor and unable to feel his legs. He knew his sister’s family was dead from the constant, unanswered ringing of their phones.

“No one said a word. “I didn’t hear any movement,” he said.

The Israeli military said it implemented evacuation procedures before acting on confirmed information about the attack in Ain el Delb. Residents who spoke to The Associated Press said they had received no warning.

“I wish we had. We would have left,” said Abdul-Hamid Ramadan, who lived on the top floor and whose wife Jinan and daughter Julia were killed. “I would have lost my house. But not my wife and daughter.”

Israel says it often issues evacuation orders before striking. But in Lebanon, as in Gaza, rights groups say advance warnings are often inadequate and come in the middle of the night or via social media.

Ramadan, a retired army officer, said he knew of no Hezbollah members or weapons in the building, where he has lived for more than 20 years.

No one thought that the neighborhood – where most residents are Sunni Muslims and Christians – would be on the list of Israeli targets. In the building, 15 of the 17 apartments were occupied by long-time residents who all knew each other. Displaced people from the south arrived a week earlier and sought shelter with relatives in the building.

Al-Baba said his sister confided to him before her death that she was concerned about a beloved Shiite tenant, especially because he had been receiving guests. She feared he could be a target by Israel and asked her brother if she should leave. She decided to stay because she had no idea where to go.

Neither al-Baba nor his sister knew anything about the tenant’s ties to Hezbollah.

Israeli attacks have stoked fears among Lebanese about the possibility that their building could be hit because it houses someone whom Israel claims, rightly or wrongly, to have ties to Hezbollah. Building managers have asked tenants to report to them the names of those displaced. Some have refused to accept people from the south.

The first strike hit the lower floors of the building around 4 p.m. The Ramadan family was shocked, but did not think the building was collapsing. Only Ramadan’s wife, Jinan, ran up the stairs. A few moments passed, long enough for Ramadan’s son Achraf to bring his sister Julia a glass of water to calm her down.

Then the second rocket hit. The building staggered and then collapsed.

Ramadan fell from the couch, which along with a nearby cupboard protected him from the falling ceiling. Achraf, a fitness trainer and former soldier, took cover under a door frame. Julia fell to the ground.

For what seemed like two hours, the three communicated through the rubble. Ramadan said Julia was only two meters away, her voice weak but audible. He called for help while still holding his cell phone.

When help arrived, Achraf was the first to get out; then his father, about six hours after the strike. In the chaos, they thought Julia had been pulled out. But rescuers returned to find the 28-year-old dead. Her mother died in hospital from internal bleeding.

“I lost the cornerstone of the house: my wife, my partner and friend,” Ramadan said. “I lost my daughter Julia… She was my joy, my smile, the future.”

They are buried in unmarked graves in a section of the Sidon cemetery dedicated to the victims of the Ain el Delb building.

As in Gaza, there are concerns that the number of civilian casualties is “quite high” as the alleged military target is often unnamed or relatively small, said Rich Weir, senior conflict, crisis and arms researcher at Human Rights Watch.

He said there has been an “escalation in terms of the extent of damage… the demolition of entire buildings in densely packed residential areas, which poses inherent risks to civilians.” Israel has also expanded the scope of its targets, hitting Hezbollah’s financial institutions, he said.

Ramadan was not surprised by the murder of so many people for one possible Hezbollah member. It’s happened before, he said.

“We hear in the news that an apartment was targeted. And people wonder who it was,” he said. “People don’t know. Israel knows.”

At the bottom of the wreckage of the building, Hecham al-Baba was trapped in pitch black darkness for four hours, pinned down with his legs bent beneath him. The falling door had broken two of his ribs. It was hard to breathe. All he could think about was that he might lose his legs.

“There was no blood flowing to my legs,” he said. ‘I couldn’t feel them. I couldn’t move. I tried to stay strong. I don’t want to remember. It upsets me.”

Finally he heard movement: people removing rocks, a bulldozer. He started screaming. His lungs and chest ache. They shouted at him to shout louder. “I told them I can’t do that.”

Then a beam of light flashed through a hole in the darkness. Seeing him, a rescuer exclaimed, “What a way to be stuck! It’s worse than a coffin.’

It took another four hours before rescuers pulled him out head first through the floor beneath him, covered in dust and soot.

The entire rescue operation took more than 43 hours. The Health Ministry puts the death toll at 45, but Sidon’s civil defense chief Mohamed Arkadan said first responders pulled 73 bodies from the rubble. Five bodies remain missing, he said.

Doctors told al-Baba that his ribs will heal with time.

But not his pain.

He said he will wear black all his life to mourn his sister. Past conflicts have never stopped him from returning to Lebanon to visit family. This time it might take a while for him to come back.

“There will be no peace,” he said, recalling his family tragedy and the wars in both Lebanon and Gaza. “No one will bring me justice. Nobody.”