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The BBCRehab Favre ran away from her home. Then he ran away again. Then a third time. Then the fourth. And for the fourth time, a year after the first time, she ran from Israeli bombs for so long that nowhere in Lebanon felt safe.
His journey began in October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel. It prompted the Lebanese political and military group Hezbollah to fire rockets into Israel and Israel and bomb southern Lebanon in retaliation.
Israeli bombs fell so close to Rehab’s village that the 33-year-old and her husband Saeed, an employee of the municipal water company, gathered their eight-year-old daughter Tia and six-year-old Nia and fled to Rehab’s parents’ home in Dahiya. A suburb of the capital Beirut.
In Dahiya, for a while, life went on almost as normal, with the exception that Nia and Tia had to leave their friends, their beds, their toys, and all the clothes they had to leave behind.
Most of them dropped out of school, which was replaced by online learning. They were thrilled when, in August, Rehab enrolled them in a new school in Beirut and took them to buy brand new school uniforms.
But before their first day arrived, Israel expanded its bombing of Lebanon to include parts of Beirut, particularly the Dahiya suburb that the family now calls home.
Israel was killing senior Hezbollah figures in the suburbs, but was using large, bunker-busting bombs, each capable of destroying a residential building. In some attacks, Israel dropped dozens of bombs at once, flattening entire city blocks.
So the Faure family packed up and fled again, this time to a rented house in another Beirut neighborhood, Jinnah. After a powerful airstrike in Jnah, they moved to Saeed’s parents’ house in the neighborhood of Barbour. There, they lived in the same house with 17 other people – people piled up.
For Taya and Nia, now nine and seven, being surrounded by their cousins day and night was an extraordinary joy. Even when Rehab’s father, a retired Lebanese army sergeant, found a rented apartment for just the four of them in the Basta neighborhood, the girls didn’t want to go.
“Niya begged us to stay there with the whole family,” Rehab recalled. “We told him we only had to go to this new house for one night, then we’d come straight back to the family and all the kids.”
And he offered the girls a deal – come stay in the new apartment and you can choose your own dinner. So on the way home they stopped for roti-seri chicken and other food from a shop, and around 7.30pm, with the streets still bustling with people, the family reached a ruined building in Basta in central Beirut.
In 2006, during the previous war between Israel and Hezbollah, bombing was limited to certain areas of Lebanon – the south, Dahih, and some infrastructure targets. This time, as senior Hezbollah members spread across the country, Israel bombed them wherever they went.
This allowed the bombs to reach places previously considered safe, including parts of central Beirut.
None of this was weighing on Tia and Nia as the family unloaded their belongings into the new apartment. For now, the girls were more concerned with getting back to their cousins at the earliest opportunity.
Unlike Saeed’s parents’ house, the new Basta apartment had a generator for water and electricity. The girls were happy when they saw that the family finally had a place of their own. Rehab and Saeed rested a little. Presumably, an Israeli drone would be buzzing overhead, but the sound had become too common in Beirut to make out.
Rehab put food and treats on the table. “We sat down to eat and we were talking and laughing,” she said. “And that was my last memory of him.”
The bomb American made was Jdam.. It hit the building around 8pm on October 10, half an hour after the family arrived. It leveled three floors and destroyed adjacent buildings and car parts. 22 men, women and children were killed.It is the deadliest strike in central Beirut since the fighting began a year ago.
The Israeli army had not issued any warning before the attack, so the building was full of people. Israel reportedly targeted Wafiq Safa, the head of Hezbollah’s liaison and liaison unit, but Safa was among the dead. Never reported. He either survived, or he wasn’t there to begin with. The IDF declined to comment on the strike or the lack of any prior warning.
Rehab woke up in Beirut’s Zahra Hospital, unable to move. His back and arms were badly injured and required at least two operations. She passed out of consciousness. Between laughing with her daughters over dinner and waking up in the hospital, her mind was blank.
As she lay there that night, her family searched Beirut’s hospitals. By midnight they came to know that Saeed and Taya were dead. DNA tests will be needed to confirm that Naya was killed, as well as another girl her age who was brought to the same hospital, as their injuries do not allow direct identification. was able to
Rehab’s doctors advised the family not to tell him anything about it. He worried that still facing major surgery, the news would be too much for him. So for two weeks, as she underwent treatment and then recovered from her operation, her mother Basima assured her that Saeed and the girls were being treated at different hospitals.
But Rehab realizes something is wrong, and starts insisting on seeing pictures and videos of the girls. “She could feel it in her heart,” Basima said.
Eleven days after the strike, a DNA test confirmed that Tia was dead, and on the fifteenth day, a psychiatrist at the hospital told Rehab that Saeed and the girls were gone.
Six weeks later, Rihab sat in a hard plastic chair in a Beirut apartment, his eyes black and his face drawn. She was still recovering from her surgeries – eight screws in her spine and three more in her arm. She had been lying down for a long time and now she was trying to get up more and walk a little even though every movement was causing her pain.
Nia’s eighth birthday was four days ago. Rehab was spending her time “either crying or sleeping,” she said. But she wanted to talk about her family.
“Nia was very attached to me, she followed me everywhere I went. Tia loved her grandparents and would have been happy if I left her with them. Both girls loved drawing, they loved toys. Loved to play, she would skip school. She would play for hours with teachers and students.
Above all, they loved watching videos together on TikTok. Rehab and Saeed thought they were still too young to post their videos online, so Rehab would film them dancing and playing and tell the girls that she was posting them on the app, much to their satisfaction. are seen
Saeed came into Rehab’s life in 2013. Rehab grew up in Beirut, but her family visited the village of May al-Jabal in the summer, because the air was cool there and the village was surrounded by countryside, and that summer she met Saeed. Mutual friends
Rehab completed her undergraduate law degree and began studying for a master’s, but the couple became engaged and then married, and Tia was soon born, so Rehab put her budding law career on hold. gave
Now, in the midst of his loss, he has temporarily begun to think about studying again. “I need something to fill my days,” she said.
The day after Saeed and Tia died, Rehab’s father and uncle buried them in makeshift wooden coffins in an unmarked grave in Dahiya. Two weeks later, the men of the family dug up the same spot again and buried Nia. Rehab’s uncle placed two sprigs of artificial cherry blossoms on the grave for both girls, and later someone else laid a wreath for a stranger buried next to them.
An Israeli airstrike then hit a building right next to the cemetery and the resulting blast wave and debris broke the tombstones and the ground around them collapsed. Around the same time, another Israeli airstrike hit the family’s home in Dahiya, destroying several items Rehab wanted to keep, including two new, unworn school uniforms.
It was not long before it was all over. A ceasefire announced last week allowed thousands of displaced people to return to their villages in southern Lebanon. Rehab and Said’s village was heavily bombed by the Israelis and their family home there was destroyed, her uncle said, but Rehab cannot return home anyway, as she will remain in retreat for several more months and not travel. Sakti
As jubilation spread across Lebanon at news of a ceasefire, new photos emerged of Wafiq Safa, the alleged target of the bomb that killed Saeed, Tia, Nia and 19 others. Safa had not been seen in public since the strike, but appeared to be alive and well.
Additional reporting by Joanna Majzoub. Photos by Joel Gunter.