In forgotten Lebanon, children are still being killed by Israel

Three weeks ago, I sat at a table in Bint Jbeil in southern Lebanon and broke bread with family and friends. The exhaustion of war wore heavily on their faces, the uncertainty of the future weighing their frames.

Two weeks ago, one of those people was murdered in an Israeli drone attack. 

The ambush, a violation of the ceasefire agreement reached in November last year between Hezbollah and Israel, also killed a father, Shadi Sobhi Sharara, and his three children. Twins Hadi and Celine, only 18 months old, were decapitated in the blast, and their sister Silane, 10, was unable to be saved. Their mother, Amani Bazzi, was left with life-threatening injuries, and their older sister Aseel, 13, has undergone several rounds of surgery and continues to fight for her life.

The Sharara family. L-R Silane, Amani (Bazzi), Shadi, twins Celine and Hadi and Aseel (Image: Facebook)

Israel used two missiles in its calculated attack on a densely populated area. The risk of civilian casualties and death was clearly extremely high. Israeli officials claim they were targeting an unnamed Hezbollah operative. They have acknowledged civilians were killed, and say they are reviewing the incident. 

At the funeral, all five coffins were draped in Lebanese flags, and only Lebanese flags were seen waving in the crowd. At other funerals in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah banners are often on display. They were buried a year to the date that Israel launched an all-out assault in southern Lebanon. That day, at least 558 people, including 50 children, were killed; 1,800 others were wounded, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Health. 

I am having a hell of a time reconciling what happened. I drove that road. I shared a meal with one of those murdered. 

The blood-splattered, twisted metal wreck of the family’s four-wheel drive. School books embedded with shrapnel and a child’s dummy among the rubble. A blood-stain that resembles a body, burned into pavement. Images of the aftermath of illegal aggression that you cannot forget. 

A grieving mother — her face swollen, bruised and grazed — holding the shrouded bodies of her children for one last goodbye before they are buried. The image is haunting. 

Amani Bazzi attends the funeral of her husband and children (Image: Courtney Bonneau)

The picture of a bewildered two-year-old, who will not remember his father’s embrace, standing at the head of his father’s coffin, as hundreds of mourners gather to bury yet more murdered people of the south, is more than I can bear witness to.

Bint Jbeil lies just a few kilometres from the historic Palestinian border. Israel moved back in after Hamas launched its attack on October 7, 2023. Every few hours, you can hear a chilling boom ring out. Sometimes, you feel the earth beneath your feet shake.

“It’s just psychological,” my family friend tells me. “They use training bombs at the border to keep us scared, but we are used to it; we are not scared.”

But it is not always “training bombs.” It would be her husband, Mohamad, who was murdered a week later.

Since the ceasefire took effect, Israel has continued to launch near-daily airstrikes in southern Lebanon and in the southern suburbs of Beirut. While we walked the Thursday souk in the middle of Bint Jbeil, and my daughter ate freshly baked manoush in her new purple shoes bought from a stall-holder, Israel pummelled a (thankfully empty) school for disabled children a few kilometres away in Aitaroun. Israel has carried out more than 4,500 ceasefire violations since the agreement was signed, according to the Lebanese army. And more than 82,000 Lebanese people remain displaced, according to Médecins Sans Frontières. 

Amnesty International, in a statement last week, said the Israeli military continues to prohibit people from border villages from returning home, and confirmed what I witnessed on the ground — the continued destruction of vital infrastructure and civilian property without military necessity.

Rubble in Bint Jbeil (Image: Laura Banks)

The deaths of the five people in Bint Jbeil were no anomaly. Four days ago, Ahmad Saad and Mustafa Rizk were killed in another targeted drone strike. The men, both engineers, were slaughtered in their car in the Khardali region as they made their way to a work site. UN Human Rights chief Volker Türk says more than 100 civilians have been killed in Lebanon since the ceasefire commenced.

The roads in the south are signposted with the faces of dead villagers killed by Israel since October 2023. Men, women, children. Their faces are indelible, imprinted forever in my mind. 

The markers of war are everywhere. The dust from decimated buildings lies thick — inside and outside. It’s insidious and it’s hard to scrub away, especially when the bombs continue to cause devastation. The people of the south are resilient; they are determined to rebuild and do their best to clear the rubble as soon as it occurs, but there is much destruction that remains. 

And the destruction is not just physical. The Lebanese government has yet to allow the International Criminal Court the jurisdiction to carry out investigations in its territory. Consequently, the victims of these violations of international law are left to wait for justice and repatriation — not to mention the psychological impact war has on a human being.

The people of the south — al jnoub, as it is fondly referred to in Arabic — have lived with the shadow of death for decades. They have battled airstrikes and Israeli occupations since the late 1970s. 

“Would you leave the jnoub?”, I ask our friend, “Come to Australia, with your degree, you could set up a life for you and your family?”

“But this is our land,” she tells me. Her eyes well with tears, and there is a determination in her voice.

The coffins of Sharara family victims of an Israeli attack (Image: Bint Jbeil News)

“What are we if we do not have our land? We do not exist if we do not have our land, our land is our heart, we must stay, this is where our hearts live.”

For those of us in the “lucky country” it may be hard to understand what that means. And I think that is why the war continues to ravage: many in the West are paralysed by privilege and very few question what happens beyond our shores.

Many from Bint Jbeil and its surrounding villages — Yaroun, Kounine, Maroun al-Ras, Aitaroun — call Australia home. There is a large population of Jnoubis and their descendants who live in Sydney and Melbourne. They know what this means.

They know that the people behind your mobile phone and your television screens are real. They have beating hearts and dreams and hopes for the future. They love and have people who love them. They are fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons. They exist. And it is only by chance that you were born here in Australia and not there, where airstrikes could kill you at any moment, and warfare messes with your mind and the minds of generations to come.