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

BEIRUT — The family WhatsApp group chat was buzzing with messages. Israel was its airstrikes are escalating about villages and towns in South Lebanon. Everyone was glued to the news.

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

His aunts decided to leave for Beirut. His father, mother and three sisters had no such plans.

Then his father announced to the group that he was a call from the Israeli army to evacuate or risk their lives. Then the conversation fell silent. Ten minutes later, Gharib called his father. There was no answer.

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

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

The Israeli military said it hit one Hezbollah site where rocket launchers and missiles are hidden.

Gharib said his family had no ties to Hezbollah. The direct hit destroyed their apartment, while the residents above and below suffered only damage, indicating that a specific part of the building was targeted. Gharib said it was his family’s home.

The attack was one of more than 1,600 that Israel said it carried out on September 23. the first day of an intensified bombardment of Lebanon that has conducted it over the past month. More than 500 people were killed that day, a number of casualties not seen in a single day in Gaza until the second week, said Emily Tripp, director of London-based Airwars, a conflict monitoring group.

Israel has promised to paralyze Hezbollah putting an end to over a year cross-border firing by the Iran-backed militant group which started the day after Hamas caused the attack on October 7, 2023 war in Gaza. It says the attacks target Hezbollah’s members and infrastructure. But among the more than 2,000 people killed in the bombing last month are also hundreds of civilians – often entire families who died in their homes.

Since then, the street where the Gharib family lived – an area of ​​shops, residential buildings and offices of international agencies in Tyre’s al-Housh district – has been ravaged 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 best friend, he said. Growing up, their father was often away, so he and his mother took charge of the family affairs.

The last time he visited his family was in May 2023, when his sister Maya, an engineering student, got engaged. She planned to get married on October 12. But as tensions with Israel increased in September, Gharib’s plans to come home for the wedding were uncertain. She told him she would postpone it until he could be there.

After the strike, her fiancé, also an army officer, found her body and those of the rest of her family in a hospital mortuary in Tyre.

“She was not meant to be married. Instead, we paraded her as a bride to paradise,” Gharib said. On the day the wedding was supposed to take place, he posted photos 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 youngest sister, Nour, 20, was studying to become a dietitian and preparing to become a personal trainer. Gharib called her the “laughter of the house.”

There is now nothing left of his family except a few photos on his phone and social media posts.

“I’m so hurt. But I know the pain will be heaviest when I come to Lebanon,” Gharib said. “There isn’t even a picture of them on the wall anymore. Their clothes are not there. Their scent is no longer in the house. The house is completely gone.”

“They took my family and the memories of them.”