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Most of all they missed going to school, which had been replaced by online learning.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.
Rihab holds a picture of her daughters, Tia and Naya, by the water's edge in Beirut
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.
FULL ARTICLE AT: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8984g9gdgo
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