Within seconds, a huge explosion shook the basement apartment. Al-Baba fell to the ground. Something hit his chest and took his breath away. She pulled herself up, reached for the door, and screamed her sister’s name. A second explosion threw him back to the ground. The bathroom ceiling and the entire building above it collapsed on its back.

The Israeli airstrike hit a six-story residential building in Ain el Delb, a neighborhood outside the coastal city of Sidon. The entire building toppled down a hillside and landed face down on the ground; He took with him 17 apartments filled with families and visitors. More than 70 people died and more than 60 were injured.

Israel claimed that the Hezbollah commander was targeted in the September 29 attack and that the building was the group’s headquarters. It could not be independently verified whether any of the residents belonged to Hezbollah.

He appeared in an old photo wearing military fatigues, a sign of allegiance to Hezbollah, in a video that surfaced online as he mourned the death of one of the people believed to have resided in the building.

In both cases, experts say the attack demonstrates Israel’s willingness to kill significant numbers of civilians for the sake of a single goal. This tactic added to the high death toll among Palestinians in Gaza in Israel’s year-long campaign against Hamas.

Israel has intensified its bombardment of Lebanon since September 23, vowing to cripple Hezbollah, which began firing into northern Israel after a Hamas attack on October 7 triggered the war in Gaza. Israel says it targets Hezbollah members and infrastructure and that the group has deployed military assets in civilian areas.

Approximately 2,000 people were killed, including Hezbollah fighters and commanders; Hundreds of civilians were also killed, often in attacks on houses.

“This appears to be a very similar feature to Gaza, in that families are being killed together in one attack,” said Emily Tripp, director of the London-based group Airwars, which monitors the conflict.

In the first week of Israel’s escalation, it struck a house in Tire province, killing a family of 15, all women and children, except for one Hezbollah member. An attack in Byblos killed six family members of a Hezbollah fighter killed in action a month ago, raising questions about the quality of the intelligence used in the attacks. 23 people died in an attack on a shack where families of Syrian migrant workers were sheltered.

The attack in Ain el Delb was one of the deadliest attacks of the Israeli campaign. Among those killed were Al Baba’s sister, her husband and two children, a girl in her 20s and a teenage boy.

Al-Baba was trapped for hours; heaps of rubble crushed him to his knees; his neck was bent, his face was stuck to the bathroom floor, and he couldn’t feel his legs. He knew his sister’s family was dead from the constant, unanswered ringing of their phones.

“Nobody said a word. I didn’t hear a movement,” he said.

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

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

Israel says it frequently issues evacuation orders before attacks. 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.

Ramazan, a retired officer, said that he did not know of any Hezbollah members or weapons in the building where he has lived for more than 20 years.

Nobody thought that the neighborhood, where most of the residents are Sunni Muslims and Christians, would be on Israel’s list of targets. 15 of the 17 flats in the building were occupied by residents who had known each other for a long time. Displaced people from the south had come to the building a week ago and started taking shelter with their relatives.

Al-Baba said his sister was worried about the Shiite tenant, who was very popular with him before he was killed, and that she trusted him, especially because he hosted guests. He feared that she might be a target for Israel and asked his brother if he should go. He decided to stay here because he didn’t know where to go.

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

Israel’s attacks have created fear among the Lebanese that their building could be hit because it houses a person Israel alleges, rightly or wrongly, to be affiliated with Hezbollah. Building managements asked tenants to inform them of the names of displaced shelters. Some refused to accept people from the south.

The first attack hit the lower floors of the building around 16:00. Ramazan family was shocked but did not think that the building would collapse. Only Ramadan’s wife, Jinan, ran to the stairs. Long enough time passed for Ramadan’s son Achraf to get his sister Julia a glass of water to calm him down.

Then the second missile hit. The building shook and then collapsed.

Ramadan fell off the couch, along with a nearby cabinet protecting him from the falling ceiling. Achraf, a fitness trainer and former soldier, hid under the 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 and her voice was faint but audible. He asked for help using his mobile phone.

When help arrived, Achraf went out first; his father later, about six hours after the strike. In this chaos, they thought Julia had retreated. However, when rescuers returned, they found the 28-year-old dead. His mother died of internal bleeding in the hospital.

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

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

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

He said there was “an increase in the amount of damage… entire buildings in densely populated areas are being demolished, which creates inherent risks for civilians.” He said that Israel expanded the scope of its targets by hitting Hezbollah’s financial institutions.

Ramazan was not surprised that so many people were killed for a possible Hezbollah member. “It’s happened before,” he said.

“We hear on the news that an apartment building was targeted. “People are wondering who he is,” he said. “People don’t know. Israel knows.”

Hecham al-Baba was trapped under the rubble of the building in pitch darkness, with his legs bent, for four hours. The falling door broke two of his ribs. It was difficult to breathe. All he thought about was that he might lose his legs.

“There was no blood in my legs,” he said. “I couldn’t feel them. I couldn’t move. I tried to stay strong. I don’t want to remember. “This makes me sad.”

Finally he heard movement: people lifting bricks, a bulldozer. He started screaming. His lungs and chest ached. They called on him to shout louder. “I told them I couldn’t do it.”

Then a beam of light shined through a hole in the darkness. A rescuer who saw him shouted: “How stuck! “Worse than a coffin.”

It took rescuers another four hours to pull him upside down from the dust and soot-covered ground.

The entire rescue operation took more than 43 hours. The Ministry of Health announced the death toll as 45, but Sidon’s civil defense chief Mohamed Arkadan said first responders recovered 73 bodies from the rubble. He said five bodies were still missing.

Doctors told El Baba that his ribs would heal over time.

But not his pain.

He said he would wear black throughout his life to mourn his sister. Past conflicts never stopped him from returning to Lebanon to visit his family. It may take a while for him to return this time.

“There will be no peace,” he said, reflecting on his family tragedy and the wars in Lebanon and Gaza. “No one will bring me justice. No one.”